THE NEW PEACE 



WILLIAM LOUIS POTEAT 



LIBRARY OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 



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Class"SjZ^4^) 

Book 2^4- 

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THE NEW PEACE 

Lectures on Science and 
Religion 

BY 

WILLIAM LOUIS POTEAT 
M.A., LL.D. 

Peace settles where the intellect is meek. — Wordsworth. 




BOSTON: RICHARD G. BADGER 

TORONTO: THE COPP CLARK CO., LIMITED 



Copyright, 1915, by Richard G. Badger 
All rights reserved 






The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



JUN 10 1915 

©GI.A406258 



n 
t 



To 

The Memory of My Father 
JAMES POTEAT 

And My Mother 

julia a. McNeill poteat 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The lectures which are here published were 
given in May, 1905, on the Brooks Foundation 
in Hamilton Theological Seminary of Colgate 
University. In October and November of the 
same year they were repeated in Crozer Theo- 
logical Seminary, Newton Theological Institution, 
Rochester Theological Institution, and the Divin- 
ity School of the University of Chicago. Dr. 
William Newton Clarke, of Hamilton, and others 
for whose judgment I have the highest respect 
urged the publication of the lectures, but, excepting 
extracts which have appeared in two issues of 
The South Atlantic Quarterly, they have lain by 
me for one reason or another now nearly ten years. 
They are now presented in their original form. 
No revision seems to be required by the passing 
of this period. Certain unimportant time refer- 
ences and illustrations need not be noted in de- 
tail because the reader will recognize them as of 
1905, not 1915. 

My hesitation has been mainly due to the re- 
flection that to many minds the whole discussion 
will seem out of date. They have already reached 



PREFATORY NOTE 

the conclusion to which it leads, and are now in- 
terested in the more positive and practical aspects 
of religion. Any such readers I can hope to serve 
in only two ways, — by providing a convenient 
summary of an argument which they may be 
pleased to recall, and by seeking to increase their 
number. 

My dependence and obligations are but slightly 
indicated by references here and there. Indeed, I 
seem to have done little more than bring together 
the thoughts of other men. So far from making 
any claim to originality of matter or treatment, I 
am only mediating the intellectual movement of 
our revolutionary period in the interest of those 
who, although close enough to^be disturbed by it, 
have had inadequate opportunities to follow it. 
William Louis Poteat. 
Wake Forest College, 
February 22, iqi$. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

INTRODUCTION . 9 

The Present Situation 10 

Plan of the Lectures 22 

LECTURE 

I WHAT IS SCIENCE ? 27 

Definition .... ..... 32 

The Scientific Method 38 

Results 42 

II THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE . . . . . . . 49 

Classification 50 

Outside Facts 52 

Inside Facts 59 

The Function of Science . . . . . . 63 

The Relations oLScience 71 

Science and Physical Well-Being ... 72 

Science and Culture 75 

III SCIENCE IN RELIGION 9 1 

- What is Religion ? 92 

The Religious Crisis 101 

Science in Religion 122 

IV RELIGION IN SCIENCE 131 

The Spirit of Science 136 

The Faith of Science 141 

The Bearing of Science 145 

The Unity of Nature . . . . . .147 

The New Teleology 1 50 

The Idealistic Interpretation of Nature . 157 



Science discloses the method of the world, but not its cause; 
Religion its cause, but not its method; and there is no conflict 
between them except when either forgets its ignorance of what 
the other alone can know. 

— James Martineau. 

He saw two angels who came one from the South and the 
other from the East. When they came close to him in heaven, 
the angel from the East clothed in purple and the angel from 
the South in hyacinth color rushed together like two breaths of 
wind, and were one. One was an angel of Love and the other 
was an angel of Wisdom. Swedenborg's guide told him that on 
earth these two angels had been bound by an inward sympathy 
and constantly united, though divided by space. 

— Balzac, Seraphita. 

The differences of Idealism and Materialism are complemen- 
tary, not antagonistic; and thought will never be completely 
fruitful until the one unites with the other. . . . It is an indis- 
putable truth that what we call the material world is only 
known to us under the forms of the ideal world. . . . The ex- 
tension of the conceptions and of the methods of physical science 
to the highest as well as the lowest phenomena of vitality is 
neither more nor less than a sort of shorthand Idealism; and 
Descartes' two paths meet at the summit of the mountain, though 
they set out on opposite sides of it. 

— Huxley, Descartes' Discourse on Method. 



THE NEW PEACE 



INTRODUCTION 

MY first duty is a personal one. I beg to 
express to you the high estimation in which 
I have held this lectureship. 1 The history of 
culture is everywhere the history of intercourse. 
The most backward tribes of men, as the in- 
habitants of the Andaman Islands and of Central 
Africa, do not know one another and are in the 
state of chronic hostility, as, on the other hand, 
the most advanced sections of the race are those 
in which communication is widest and freest. 
It must be so in the case of distinct departments 
of inquiry. Each of them is under its own law, 
but owes a higher allegiance to the unity of all 
truth. Specialism is perpetually threatened by 
the nemesis of isolation, and isolation in the in- 
tellectual realm is the mother of strife and has 
but one eye, and that dim with a cataract. The 
Brooks foundation recognizes the higher law of 
fellowship in the kingdom of truth. From time 

1 The Brooks Foundation in Hamilton Theological Seminary. 
9 



io THE NEW PEACE 

to time it calls into the school of theology a 
worker in the school of science, and however in- 
different his particular service may be, the total 
result cannot but be reciprocally beneficial in the 
highest degree to the two schools of thought. I 
am not sure that such an example of the hospi- 
tality of theology towards science ought not to 
be emulated oftener by science in openness to 
informed theological suggestion. As I think we 
shall see presently, science has not been able to 
answer all her questions, and on the deepest of 
them, I half suspect, the hopeful digging must be 
done over the fence in the theological preserve. 
My own appointment to service upon this honor- 
able foundation, you will let me say, has been 
the occasion of the keenest personal gratification. 
I venture to hope that our thinking together on 
the great themes which invite us will, at least in 
some scant measure, promote the aims of the 
noble man in whose memory we shall be meeting. 

The Present Situation 

It will probably be serviceable to pause on the 
threshold of our discussion in order to examine 
briefly the present situation of the religion and 
science question. 

And first let me remind you that knowledge 
is not hereditary, though the capacity for knowl- 



INTRODUCTION 1 1 

edge may be. It is only the receptacle that our 
ancestry furnishes. We must fill it ourselves. 
Nor is knowledge a devisable commodity. It is 
always self-acquired. Experience keeps the only 
school there is. In the literal sense, but in no 
other, does the child start life on his father's 
shoulder. He must begin at the ground. He 
must pick his own path through the labyrinth. 
The law may seem severe and the spectacle pa- 
thetic, but there is no release. A generation 
fares no better in this regard than the individual. 
It does not stand on the shoulders of its pred- 
ecessor. Except in the mere appurtenances of 
life, it starts life afresh. It is, indeed, born into 
its environment, but must conquer its place there. 
The very language which it will speak it must 
acquire; the implements of its intellectual and 
spiritual achievement it must grow. Its own pe- 
culiar problems, practical, social, intellectual, it 
must treat precisely as if no preceding generation 
ever had a problem. In all its larger and higher 
interests the so-called lessons of history, by some 
strange lapse of memory or defect of adaptation, 
seem not to be available. 

Accordingly, it turns out that successive periods 
in the history of thought, from the earliest to 
the latest, in spite of the peculiar features which 
individualize them, present a curious family re- 



12 THE NEW PEACE 

semblance. Such common traits stand out with 
striking distinctness in a comparison of the 
periods properly styled revolutionary — periods 
when a new view has turned things topsy-turvy, 
when a new method has been grasped, or a new 
province added to the intellectual domain. For 
human nature is very human wherever you come 
upon it. It responds in much the same way, 
whatever stimulus is applied. As the optic nerve 
and visual centre under any excitation, whether 
luminous or mechanical or electrical, unvaryingly 
react with the sensation of light in accordance 
with their specific energy, so human thought, in 
response to the deep stirring of it by any sort of 
agency, takes up one predictable itinerary, passing 
from attitude to attitude unconsciously in the very 
tracks which it made when it was last stirred to 
movement. One would suppose antecedently 
that those who form and guide the thought cur- 
rents in these revolutionary periods must be famil- 
iar with the history of opinion, and in the light 
of that history, although they might not be able 
to forestall the repetition of its distressing fea- 
tures, would at least be on guard against over- 
sensitiveness to their influence in view of their 
recognized transitional character. But it has not 
in very fact been so — not even in the last revolu- 
tion, which has had the double advantage of the 



INTRODUCTION 13 

largest number of monitory examples and the 
widest intelligence to apprehend them. So little 
can we learn from those who have gone this 
way before us. 2 We must needs have our own 
experience and, unhelped of the counselling past, 
work out our own salvation with fear and trem- 
bling. 

Nevertheless, it will be worth while, at our 
leisure, to place our epoch alongside its fellows 
of the former time. They will throw light upon 
it, and suggest a hopeful issue. It will take the 
edge off any anxiety which we may feel to-day, 
if we are in a position to reflect that the present 
distress is not without precedent, that " it hath 
been already in the ages which were before us." 
We shall see that, as heretofore so now, the 
threatened passing of religion is only another 
false alarm, and that the terror with which many 
minds have watched the eclipse of faith as if 
it were the closing in of night is not wholly devoid 
of a ludicrous suggestiveness. 

A recent student of the transitional eras in the 
history of human thought has cited four as typi- 
cal, — - the era of the Greek Sophists in the fifth 
century before Christ, the era of transition from 
mediaeval to modern times, the Illumination era 

2 Ecclesiastes, 1:11. 



i 4 THE NEW PEACE 

of the eighteenth century, and the present era. 3 
There is no time for so much as a bare sketch 
of the forces in which the first three of these 
eras took their rise, or of their special features 
and issue. It must suffice here to point out the 
constant features which reappear in them all as 
well as in our own era, which of course is the 
concern of these lectures. We observe, first, the 
coming of the new thought like the irruption of 
an armed band into the peace of a secluded valley. 
Under the sanction of its convincingness, there fol- 
lows criticism of the old thought as being incom- 
patible ; then disintegration, confusion, and a skep- 
tical despair, spreading beyond the borders of 
speculation to invade the realm of conduct; then 
springs up dissatisfaction with the method and 
results of negation, to be followed shortly with 
the constructive work of adjustment and reor- 
ganization, wherein is gathered up what was vital 
and precious in the old thought freshened and 
enriched by the incorporation of the new. 

In our own epoch these typical transition stages, 
which of course are stated here in the logical 
order, are easily recognizable, — the last of the 
stages, I venture to say, already realized, as dis- 
tinctly as the others, in a large section of the 
serious-minded world. But the interest which 

3 Armstrong, "Transitional Eras in Thought," Chap. II. 



INTRODUCTION 15 

this great transition has for us lies also in part 
in the special features which differentiate it from 
its predecessors. For example, many streams 
from the older times pour their floods into ours 
to give it an unexampled complexity. We are 
occupied, indeed, with the problems which the 
Illumination left unsettled, but from a somewhat 
different point of view. Besides, we have prob- 
lems of our own which, while their seeds 
sprouted before, yet reached the acme of develop- 
ment, became acute problems, in our period and 
distinguish it. But the chief differentia of this 
transitional era are, — democracy, with popular 
enlightenment, industrialism, and physical science, 
each with a wide range of influence upon con- 
temporary life and thought. All these peculiar 
features must be set on one side, except the last. 
They are interesting in themselves and important, 
but are beside the present purpose. Science and 
the new phase of the religious question which it 
brought on — these set the limits of our inquiry. 
How did science bring on the religious ques- 
tion? What is the genesis of this disastrous con- 
troversy between the men of science and the men 
of religion? In the first place f the Reformers 
who scouted an infallible church set up an in- 
fallible book as the ultimate authority on all mat- 
ters to which it referred. The Bible was assumed 



1 6 THE NEW PEACE 

to speak the last word, not only on Hebrew his- 
tory and religion, but also on the facts of physi- 
cal nature. Its interpreters opposed the rising 
scientific view whenever it collided with the Bibli- 
cal view, as they saw it, and so won for the re- 
ligion which they represented the odium of an- 
tagonism to science. Secondly, the current sys- 
tems of theology, which were formulated and 
closed before the rise of modern science, con- 
tained implications and sometimes explicit state- 
ments sharply opposed to assured scientific re- 
sults. Men of science and theologians them- 
selves practically identified religion with such 
formal expressions of it; and here again religion 
appeared to be in conflict with science. Thirdly, 
the fixed habit of unquestioning appeal to author- 
ity and to precedent was fostered and perpetuated 
by the prevailing system of education, and this 
education was under religious control. When 
independence spoke, as it did almost solely in 
the language of science, it spoke against authority 
entrenched in religious sanctions; and yet again 
religion and science were at strife. Lastly, the 
religious experience itself presupposes the exist- 
ence in human nature of a feature which fails to 
respond to any of the scientific tests, and it postu- 
lates another world beyond the sweep of the scien- 
tific vision. The basis of religion, it is said, 



INTRODUCTION 17 

science does not know and cannot justify; and 
once more religion and science part company with 
averted faces. 

Now, it takes two to make a quarrel, and in 
this controversy born of blunders, in this " battle- 
ground of darkness " where friends have been 
fighting one another, the responsibility belongs to 
both the antagonists. Working apart, they mis- 
understood each other. The theologian had no 
more training in science than the inhabitants of 
Jupiter who, according to Swedenborg, do not 
affect the sciences, calling them shades. The 
man of science, on his part, preoccupied with the 
world of sense, lost interest in the supersensuous 
realm, then forgot it, then denied it. Conflict 
was inevitable. 

Simple and clear as is the origin of the con- 
troversy, its present status is most complicated 
and difficult to describe. The solutions of the 
problem which have been proposed from time to 
time, while logically progressive, have not suc- 
cessively supplanted one another so as to leave 
the last in sole possession of the field. One finds 
them all side by side in practical vigor in the 
world of intelligence to-day. There is the doc- 
trine of the " double truth," which holds science 
and religion to be equally true, though contra- 
dictory; they are wholly unrelated. There is 



1 8 THE NEW PEACE 

supernaturalism, insisting that dogma cannot con- 
tradict reason because it is above reason — peace, 
you observe, secured under " a treaty of bound- 
aries." And rationalism, the expression of revolt 
from supernaturalism, is still criticising the body 
of traditional beliefs, still assuming religion to be 
identical with its dogmatic representation. Prob- 
ably the next thoughtful man you meet will be a 
mystic who is superior to the pressure of our 
religious problem because he is at once assured 
in his inner sense of the higher realities and in- 
different to ecclesiastical forms and beliefs. And 
now and then you will encounter the student of 
the science of religion, to which, at any rate in 
his view, is committed the final settlement of the 
claims of science and religion. 

The situation is further complicated by the 
varying practical attitudes which men have taken 
towards the question. For many minds it has no 
interest whatever. Some do not stand where the 
streams of our intellectual life are flowing. Some 
who do are wholly absorbed in the products of 
the mystical fancy, in the theosophies of India, 
or the new psychologies of the sub-conscious self, 
and the threat of scientific materialism is too re- 
mote to reach them. Others once keenly aware 
of it have grown weary of its long overdue proph- 
ecies and dropped it out of mind. Moreover, 



INTRODUCTION . 19 

some of the foremost of the students of science 
also are indifferent; they interpret the quieting 
down of attack as surrender; they have ceased 
to criticise the statements of idealism and re- 
ligion, and, in courteous and respectful estrange- 
ment, devote themselves to their task of strength- 
ening the claims of science and widening the range 
of its authority. On the other hand, those who 
do feel concern in the religious question have 
made very unequal progress in the discussion of 
it. Some stand even now in mortal terror of 
the newly discovered Darwin and his " bulldog," 
while others have passed through the evolution 
struggle and are now engaged in the reconstruc- 
tion of Christian dogmatics from the evolutionary 
view-point. Correspondingly, not a few men of 
science are urging, with a sort of fresh apostolic 
ardor, that physics and chemistry are the all- 
sufficient solvents of the mysteries of the universe, 
that thinking and willing and feeling are only 
matters of varying molecular stress; but some of 
their comrades in labor have completed the cycle 
of scientific thought and gone through the limita- 
tions of its method to find that nature is at bot- 
tom mental. In one part of the field the battle 
waxes warm, in another hostilities are suspended 
under a flag of truce and articles of a formal rec- 
onciliation are being drawn up, in yet another 



20 THE NEW PEACE 

friends of years take counsel of one another and 
marvel at the tragedy of the early alienation. 

The difficulty of dealing with such a situation 
is obvious. But another difficulty must be added. 
In the study of the relations of science and re- 
ligion, we are dealing with tendencies and values, 
with tone and emphasis and bearing, with impli- 
cations and general impressions. These value 
judgments it is more difficult to set forth than a 
definite body of teaching would be. Sharpness 
of outline and precision are just the qualities 
which they lack. The result of the effort to 
sketch them will be more or less under haze, 
however much care one may devote to the delinea- 
tion. Moreover, the play of the personal equa- 
tion, for which there is large room, may give to 
the work of one student a color which will not 
blend kindly with the color of another piece of 
work in the same field, if, indeed, there be not 
opportunity for a deeper divergence. We ought 
to be prepared for both the indistinctness and the 
difference of treatment, and be on guard against 
exaggerating the significance of either. They be- 
long to the subject itself, at least to the stage of 
development which it has now reached. The dis- 
cussion, as we have seen, is still under way. Pre- 
cise and authoritative conclusions are yet to be 
formulated. Besides, material for the argument 



INTRODUCTION 21 

may be gathered at well-nigh every point in the 
whole range of human learning, both philosophical 
and scientific. So vast a continent no man will 
ever again master. One may break into its riches 
here and there and bear off a pebble or two. One 
may climb a little hill and look about one to won- 
der and to covet. But to be at home in these wide 
reaches of plain and upland and cloud-capped 
mountain, — even Aristotle, " the master of those 
that know," or Francis Bacon, or Alexander Hum- 
boldt, would lose his way and be driven to seek 
some one to guide him, however much he might 
be helped by the cognate relation of the branches 
of knowledge. A consistent and a definitive treat- 
ment of our problem, where so much is involved, 
is, I fear, many years ahead of us, and must be 
the work of many minds co-operant each accord- 
ing to its place and outlook. 

From the point of view of the present discus- 
sion science and religion are not inherently an- 
tagonistic. And this absence of antagonism is 
not the result of their occupation of distinct 
spheres which are without contact or communica- 
tion. They are, on the contrary, bound together 
in the relation of positive friendship. And that 
union is more intimate than that of the two planta- 
tions which came to a neighbor of mine in the 
division of the ancestral estate. There fell to 



22 THE NEW PEACE 

him two tracts of land some four hundred yards 
apart. But the commissioners apportioned to him 
in addition a narrow strip of land connecting the 
two tracts, so that he might, as they said, drive 
his hogs from one to the other without having 
to cross another man's property. Whose prop- 
erty could lie between the tract of science and 
the tract of religion? There would be nobody to 
claim it. No; the two regions lie full alongside. 
They are, rather, continuous, and the line which 
has divided them is artificial, the creation of a 
too exclusive specialism. It is like the lines 
drawn by ignorance and prejudice between sec- 
tions of one great country, as East and West, 
North and South. I shall be glad when the 
memorials of this fictitious boundary retain only 
an historic interest, like the stones which once 
marked Mason and Dixon's Line, some of which 
are now preserved in a Baltimore museum as his- 
torical curiosities. 

Plan of the Lectures 

As Socrates and Phaedrus lay on the grass under 
the plane-tree outside the walls of Athens and 
discussed an oration of Lysias, Socrates remarked, 
as he began a rival composition of his own on the 
same theme, " On every subject there is but one 
mode of beginning for those who would deliberate 



INTRODUCTION 23 

well. They must know what the thing is on which 
they are deliberating, or else of necessity go alto- 
gether astray." Let us respect this counsel and 
seek first of all to establish a definition of science 
and a definition of religion, and then, " with these 
to look back upon, proceed to consider " their re- 
lations. Accordingly, the subjects of the lectures 
will be, — " What is Science?" " The Scope of 
Science" (involving function and relations), 
" Science in Religion," and " Religion in Science." 



LECTURE I 
WHAT IS SCIENCE? 



Let thy studies be free as thy thoughts and con- 
templations; hut fly not upon the wings of imagina- 
tion; join sense unto reason, and experiment unto 
speculation, and so give life unto emhryon truths, 
and verities yet in their chaos. . . . The world, 
which took hut six days to make, is like to take 
six thousand to make out. 
— Sir Thomas Browne, Christian Morals, 1 1. v. 

Go, my sons, sell your lands, your houses, your 
garments and your jewelry; burn up your books. 
On the other hand, buy yourselves stout shoes, get 
away to the mountains, search the valleys, the 
deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest 
recesses of the earth; mark well the distinction 
between animals, the differences among plants, the 
various kinds of minerals, the properties and mode 
of origin of everything that exists. Be not 
ashamed to learn by heart the astronomy and 
terrestrial philosophy of the peasantry. Lastly, 
purchase coals, build furnaces, watch and experi- 
ment without wearying. In this way, and no 
other, will you arrive at a knowledge of things 
and of their properties. 

— Peter Severinus, sixteenth century. 

Danish Professor of Poetry, Meteorol- 
ogy and Medicine. (Cited by Geikie, 
Founders of Geology). 



WHAT IS SCIENCE? 

OUR period is often called the scientific age, 
and yet in large areas of the public mind of 
to-day the whole matter of science is enveloped 
in cloud. Misapprehension of it and suspicion 
were, perhaps, to be expected when it first intruded 
itself among the intellectual pursuits at the dawn 
of the modern era. Roger Bacon and Bungay, 
who laid the foundations of English science at 
Oxford, were, not unnaturally, the objects of 
popular suspicion and bore the odium of prying 
wizards. The first scientific society of which we 
have definite record was established in Naples in 
1560 under the presidency of Baptista Porta, and 
bore the name " Academia Secretorum Naturae." 
It arose out of a meeting of scientific friends in 
Porta's house, who called themselves with a gay 
irony Otiosi. The name of the Academy was a 
suspicious one. It suggested magic and the black 
arts. The suspicion was contagious and spread 
northward to Rome. The Pope sent for Porta. 
The Pope made a distinction between the Presi- 
dent and his Academy, whether on the ground of 
the demonstrated cleverness and good intentions 
of the President standing actually before him, 

27 



28 THE NEW PEACE 

while the Academy, distant and vague, took on 
imaginary terrors, I do not know. But the Pope 
made a distinction : he absolved the President, but 
dissolved the Academy. The founding of the 
Royal Society about a hundred years later is one 
of the landmarks in the progress of science, but 
Addison and Steele make sport of it. 1 

Happily to-day no one anticipates the dissolu- 
tion, of Italian, English, or American scientific 
associations by either ecclesiastical or civil author- 
ity. The time for that sort of impeachment is 
wholly passed away. But are the wits who were 
wont to pasture in the scientific field all dead? 
Are we quite sure that even in this scientific age 
there are no survivals of the early ill repute of 
science when it was fighting its way to respectabil- 
ity? Is the man of science, who wins ideas, alto- 
gether on the same footing as the man of busi- 
ness, who wins wealth? Is he not often the vic- 
tim of pen and pencil caricature? Is he never 
regarded as a harmless sort of creature throwing 
himself away after insoluble puzzles or collect- 
ing useless facts very much as little children collect 
in their play-houses bright bits of broken glass and 
china? " One friend of mine," says Browning in 
the " Easter-Day,"— 

1 Tatler, 221, 236. 



MISCONCEPTION 29 

One friend of mine wears out his eyes, 
Slighting the stupid joys of sense, 
In patient hope that, ten years hence, 
" Somewhat completer," he may say, 
"My list of Coleoptera!" 

And, may I ask, why all this ado when a man like 
Lord Kelvin declares to his associates that science 
affirms a creative and directive Power? What is 
the significance of the all but hysterical interest 
which religious circles take when Wallace, in the 
name of science, replaces man at the centre of 
cosmic relations? Is it not that such declarations 
in favor of religion by men of mark in science are 
as unexpected as they are comforting? And does 
not science even yet meet that " troublesome and 
difficult opponent " — " a blind and immoderate 
zeal for religion " — which Bacon recognized in 
every age from the ancient Greeks downward? 
Does not one hear now and then covert or open 
detraction of science and men of science on the 
part of divines, who, in the words of the Novum 
Organum, have mingled with the substance of re- 
ligion " an undue proportion of the contentious 
and thorny philosophy of Aristotle " ? 

If we pass into the realm of letters, we may 
catch the same note of prejudice and distrust. 
Here is Mr. John Morley approving the view of 
Dr. Thomas Arnold: " Rather than have phys- 



3 o THE NEW PEACE 

ical science the principal thing in my son's mind, 
I would gladly have him think that the sun went 
round the earth, and that the stars were so many 
spangles set in the bright blue firmament." A 
few months ago a writer of distinction, in an Eng- 
lish review, remarked contemptuously, " It's all 
about ' science ' — and therefore does not concern 
me " ; and he went on to wonder whether there 
were many men who shared his feeling, which, 
he said, often took the form of a dread, almost 
a terror. 

Perhaps the suspicion-tinged mist through which 
many persons look at science has drifted over the 
popular mind out of the fields of science itself. 
Its technical phraseology, sometimes foolishly 
paraded, is both diverting and unintelligible. In 
an old Irish tale a bard who had spoken before 
the King and his warriors is warmly praised, be- 
cause neither the King nor any other could under- 
stand him, " so great was his high, noble, beauti- 
ful obscurity." The gift of sane and clear ex- 
position is no more common on *:he scientific plat- 
form than on the theological. Besides, certain 
men, invoking the certitude of physical science, 
have been rudely inconsiderate of the religious 
sentiment, which, on its part, instead of going to 
pieces under the violence of the attack, merely 
withdrew within itself, reflecting what a dread- 



MISCONCEPTION 31 

ful thing this science must be! All this may be 
admitted, but whatever extenuation of this popular 
attitude may have been supplied by the eccentricity, 
the oracular airs, the cloistral seclusion, or the 
materialism of individual men of science, it is in 
reality without foundation. To see that it is so, 
we have only to lift our thought from men to 
their work, and from the details of observation 
and experiment to the general principles which 
they have yielded. Accordingly, let us address 
ourselves to the search for the definition of science. 
If we can find it, it may protect us against the 
contagion of the popular feeling to which I have 
referred, and also against certain errors of popu- 
lar thinking. For many droll and extravagant 
notions about science are still current even among 
those who have the reputation of general intel- 
ligence. People still experience Alexander Pope's 
difficulty of " holding the eel of science by the 
tail." The subject-matter of science is thought 
to lie apart in a sort of mystical world. The 
method of science is conceived of as a sort of one- 
eyed hunting in obscure corners and dragging out 
into the light curious little odds and ends which 
would perhaps have been as well left in the dark- 
ness. The results of science excite a distant and 
dubious wonder not very unlike that awakened 
by legerdemain. The scientific investigator him- 



32 THE NEW PEACE 

self is a modern version of the magician Doctor 
Faustus, who went about with the devil as a com- 
panion in the shape of a dog, and who, according 
to an old Leipzig chronicle, was able on occasion 
to ride out of a cellar on a bewitched barrel of 
wine. 

On the contrary, as I need not remind you, 
science demands of her votaries no mystical or 
magic powers. Her achievements have been 
made neither by accident, nor by a series of con- 
juring tricks, nor yet with the co-operation of evil 
spirits. The noble structure which she has reared 
in this modern day is the very shelter and dwelling 
of our life, and it is time all men recognized her 
and felt at home in her gracious presence. For, 
I protest, seen near at hand, she is all kindness 
and simplicity. And they will so recognize her as 
soon as the demand of science for a place in every 
stage of the educational process is made good. 

Definition 

Of course, science is knowledge, but it is not 
true that every form of knowledge is science. 
Here is art, for example, in the industrial and in 
the aesthetic sense. Art rests on a foundation of 
knowledge, but its aim is not truth, but utility or 
beauty. Knowledge in science is the end, in art 
only the means to an end. Accordingly, the 



DEFINITION 33 

knowledge with which art is concerned need be no 
fuller and no more exact than suffices for the 
matter in hand, whereas science is content with 
nothing short of the whole truth. Again, science 
is not quite synonymous with philosophy, although 
truth is the aim of both. In the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries philosophy was often used as 
the equivalent of what we now mean by science, 
and even in our own time the science of physics has 
been called natural philosophy. But present usage 
restricts the term philosophy to metaphysics, which 
a French historian, I think profanely, defined as 
the art of confounding oneself methodically. 
Science discovers the orderly sequence of events 
in nature; philosophy asks why this sequence 
rather than another? Why any sequence? 
Science looks abroad and collates; philosophy 
looks within and thinks. Science experiments, 
testing its theory by the course of events under 
artificial and controllable conditions; philosophy 
reflects, testing its theory by seeking its place in 
a logical system. And yet science is not all ob- 
serving and registering. Its method demands the 
use of the rational powers, and abstract concep- 
tions are an important part of the equipment, as 
they are the aim, of its investigation. Science 
readily runs to philosophy. Set here in the midst 
of mystery, we are smitten with an irresistible 



34 THE NEW PEACE 

curiosity and must have an explanation. The 
search for it begins early, as early in fact as three 
years of age. The onset of " the questioning 
mania" is signalized by the question "What?" 
"How?" treads on the heels of "What?" and 
"Why?" on the heels of "How?" A meta- 
physician of three summers stated this problem: 
" If I had gone up stairs, could God make it that 
I hadn't? " A practical American philosopher of 
eight asked, " Why don't God kill the devil, and 
then there would be no more wickedness in the 
world? " And another, " If God wanted me to 
be good, and I wouldn't, which would win?" 
This truth-hunger is one of the badges of our 
nobility. It grows upon its proper food, which, 
like Dante's bread of angels, sustains but never 
sates; so that, diversion and preoccupation apart, 
it subsides only in the general decay of old age. 
What wonder, then, that the men on the advance 
line of scientific inquiry drop so easily into philoso- 
phy, passing unconsciously from the cognitive pro- 
cess and the investigation of phenomenal reality 
over into speculation about the ultimate reality, 
which is the special note of philosophy. 

There is yet another body of knowledge with 
which science is hardly to be identified. I refer 
to theology. Professor Briggs has lately defined 
theology, in its comprehensive and proper use, as 



DEFINITION 35 

the study of God and of all things in their rela- 
tions to Him. And he insists that theology is and 
must ever be the queen of studies, for all other 
studies have to do with particular provinces of the 
realm of truth, whereas theology covers the en- 
tire realm. 2 Now, science does not directly and 
explicitly make God the subject of investigation, 
but the " all things " which Professor Briggs 
stakes out here as the claim of theology are ex- 
actly the ground where science is busying itself. 
Is science a squatter on the theological domain? 
If their spheres are so nearly coterminous, wherein 
lies the difference between theology and science? 
There is, first, let me say, the difference of em- 
phasis. Theology is concerned with things not 
on their own account, but only because of their 
relation to God. Science is concerned with things 
for their own sake, and only thinks of their rela- 
tion to God when, rising into philosophy, it seeks 
their ultimate explanation. There is, secondly, 
the difference of the means of knowledge which 
they employ, — reason and the five senses in 
science, reason and the spiritual sense in theology. 
Nevertheless, from one point of view they appear 
to coincide. Theology is not religion, as science 
is not nature. The religious experience is one 
thing; the explanation of it — theology in the re- 

2 American Journ. of Theology, July, 1904. 



36 THE NEW PEACE 

stricted sense — is another. But the religious ex- 
perience is a fact of nature, and as such it is clearly 
open to scientific investigation. When, there- 
fore, science deals with this section of the world 
of nature, it coalesces with theology, the two dis- 
ciplines having the same relation to religion. 

The modicum of knowledge which is mixed 
with varying proportions of error or fancy in num- 
erous nostrums, fads, and cults afloat to-day on the 
stream of printer's ink, must, like the crane found 
among the farmer's geese, take the consequence 
of its unfortunate alliance. It need not detain 
us beyond this passing reference. The well-in- 
formed recognize the combination as pseudo- 
science, for all its careful conning of scientific 
phrases and its specious offerings upon the altar of 
science. 

A final limitation of the word knowledge in 
our definition of science as knowledge, must be 
made. And by this time you are doubtless as- 
sured of the truth of Rousseau's paradox, that 
definitions might be good, if words were not used 
in making them. The fund of what may be called 
common knowledge is large and of the highest 
importance. It suffices for the practical conduct 
of life amidst the intricate relations of the external 
world. Moreover, the sphere, the aim, and the 
method of common knowledge are essentially the 



DEFINITION 37 

same as those of scientific knowledge. And yet 
it is not quite the same as scientific knowledge. 
To rise to that level it requires to add two quali- 
ties, — precision and co-ordination. We con- 
clude, therefore, with Herbert Spencer, that 
science is " simply a higher development of com- 
mon knowledge," that is to say, common knowl- 
edge made precise and full and systematic. Let 
me illustrate. The world in which we live is 
thronged with animals of many different kinds. 
That fact is an item of common knowledge. But 
the demands of scientific knowledge are not met 
by a statement so indefinite. It requires the exact 
number of the different kinds of animals, together 
with the grouping of them according to their 
similarities and dissimilarities. And so all known 
forms are described in detail, stationed in a sys- 
tem, and catalogued. When a new one is dis- 
covered, whether a microscopic dweller in the 
slime of a stagnant pool or a giraffe in central 
Africa, the trumpets of the science journals are 
blown, and in full view of the scientific world the 
new-found thing is described and christened amid 
appropriate ceremonies and congratulations of the 
now rare and fortunate discoverer. In the hands 
of the man of science, the average man's statement, 
many animals of many kinds, is expanded into 
Zoology. Take another illustration. A little 



38 THE NEW PEACE 

girl asked, " How do my thoughts get from my 
brain to my mouth, and how does my spirit make 
my legs walk?" Now, ordinary knowledge gets 
but a little way beyond the simple facts which 
the child wished explained. But science answers 
the question — not completely, it must be owned 
— with Histology, Physiology, and Psychology. 

The Scientific Method 

So much has been said about the scientific 
method, there is no wonder that it is believed to be 
unique and magical and one of the inventions of the 
century which applied it with such brilliant results. 
In reality, neither the nineteenth nor the eighteenth 
century can take the credit of inventing this fruit- 
ful method. Nor yet did it originate in the 
Renascence, as some suppose. Descartes' " Dis- 
course on Method," important as it is in the his- 
tory of modern thinking, did not show for the first 
time the value of deduction and induction as means 
of knowledge. And we may question the legit- 
imacy of the title of Francis Bacon's great work. 
The inductive method which it elaborated was 
really not a " new instrument," and his influence 
upon scientific progress has been much exagger- 
ated. Professor Huxley is doubtless correct 
when he says that men like Galileo and Harvey 
and Newton would have done their work just as 



METHOD 39 

well if neither Bacon nor Descartes had ever pro- 
pounded their views respecting the method of 
scientific investigation. Certainly Aristotle, who 
antedated them nearly two millenniums, was in no 
wise indebted to their expositions, and his work, 
especially in the observational sciences, in spite of 
error and fancies here and there, clearly bears 
the distinctive mark of the scientific method. And 
Archimedes is the originator of the science of 
Mechanics. Even beyond Aristotle and Archi- 
medes it may be traced in the Greek philosophers 
of the fifth and sixth centuries B.C., who displaced 
the current theological view with the rational 
view of natural phenomena. We may go still 
farther and say that the outlines of modern 
science were rudely sketched by primitive man 
when he brought his reason face to face with 
nature. The animal lore out of which totemism 
springs is a primitive zoology; and when the Lapp 
transfers the domestic relations of father, mother, 
and child to different kinds of stones, he is merely 
classifying them much as a modern geologist 
would do in more prosaic terms. 

In reality the method of science is only the 
method of common sense applied with care. It is 
the method which the man of business habitually 
uses in the humblest matters with more or less 
carelessness. The man of science is only more 



40 THE NEW PEACE 

patient, more scrupulous, more exact. An illiter- 
ate but strong-minded old woman of the North 
Carolina mountains once gave me a graphic de- 
scription of a trip which she made in her girlhood 
down to Fayetteville with her father, who was 
" wagoning " to that emporium of the old days. 
She told how the sand of that low country cut off 
her stockings at the level of her shoe-tops, and 
how, as she stooped to examine the wheels of the 
first railway train she ever saw, some one said, 
" That thing will cut your head off! " whereupon 
she fled away so fast and so far that her father, 
as she said, " wouldn't never 'a found me, ef it 
hadn't 'a been for the prints of the nailheads in 
my shoe bottoms ! " The mental process by 
which that mountain wagoner found his fright- 
ened child was identical with that by which Cuvier, 
Hugh Miller, and Marsh have recovered the lost 
life of the ancient world from footprints and frag- 
ments of bone. The universal method of all 
knowledge of material things is, in brief, observa- 
tion, inference, verification. I may illustrate it 
by a comparatively recent research upon the cause 
of a curious and fatal disorder of central Africa. 
It is known as " sleeping sickness " from its chief 
symptom. In the district of Uganda alone it 
killed 100,000 of the population in two years. 
Now, the learned author of the " Anatomy of 



METHOD 41 

Melancholy," not less complacently than the na- 
tive medicine-men, would most probably have re- 
ferred the malady to the devil operating through 
" such as command him in show at least, as con- 
jurors and magicians, or such as are commanded, 
as witches." Not so Col. David Bruce, who 
spent some five months in Uganda in 1903. 
Eight years before he had shown the tsetze-fly 
disease of South Africa to be due to the presence 
in the blood of horses and cattle of an animal 
parasite, Trypanosoma, carried by the bite of the 
tsetze-fly. On his arrival in Uganda he was told 
that this parasite had been seen in the cerebro- 
spinal fluid of a certain victim of the sleeping sick- 
ness. This observation he confirmed and ex- 
tended. He found the parasite in the blood of 
28 per cent, of the population of the infected re- 
gion and in the cerebro-spinal fluid of every vic- 
tim of the disease. It was absent, moreover, 
from this fluid in every case not affected by the 
disease. These observations prompted an infer- 
ence, namely, that this parasite is the cause of 
sleeping sickness after it passes from the blood into 
the cerebro-spinal fluid. His observations upon 
the closely related parasite in tsetze-fly disease in 
1895 naturally suggested the added inference that 
the parasite is transported from patient to patient 
by the tsetze-fly. The next step in the research was 



42 THE NEW PEACE 

to verify the inference. In the first place, he dis- 
covered a species of this fly, and found that the 
range of its distribution corresponded precisely 
with the distribution of the disease and where the 
fly did not occur the disease did not occur. In the 
second place, after finding a certain species of 
monkey to be susceptible to the disease, he caused 
the flies which had bitten infected negroes to bite 
monkeys, which invariably died with the char- 
acteristic symptoms of sleeping sickness and 
showed the parasite in the cerebro-spinal fluid. 
And so the inference which observation suggested 
was verified by experiment, and the real cause of 
the disease was discovered. 

Results 

If, now, the method of science is everywhere 
one and invariable, why, it may be asked, was it so 
comparatively barren, say, in the sixteenth century, 
and so exuberantly fruitful in the nineteenth? To 
present the contrast in concrete form, what is the 
difference between the work of Paracelsus in 
physiological chemistry and that of Claude Bern- 
ard? The difference lay in the relative emphasis 
of the several factors of the scientific method 
in the two cases. Inference and hypothesis are 
essential steps in an investigation, but they are 
steps only — steps between observation and ex- 



RESULTS 43 

periment. In Paracelsus hypothesis was supreme, 
in Bernard the test of experiment. And the 
period covered by Bernard's activity in physiologi- 
cal research coincides roughly with that of the most 
marked and rapid scientific progress which history 
has to show. If, as has been lately suggested, the 
scientific credit of an age is to be determined by 
dividing the mean truthfulness of its work by its 
opportunities of reaching the truth, the Victorian 
age does not, perhaps, so far outrank its pred- 
ecessors. But when we recall the fact that Vic- 
torian science itself largely created the means and 
the opportunities of its advancement, it distances 
Greeks, Arabs, and the scholars of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries not only in the totality 
of its permanent acquisitions, but also in the 
scientific credit which is its due. In fact, we seem 
to be justified in setting this brief period of, say, 
seventy-five years over against all preceding periods 
combined. The outburst of intellectual energy 
which distinguished the fourth decade of the last 
century, fortunately for science, was not attracted 
by the cold beauties of a revived classicalism, nor 
yet by the flippant and negative philosophizing of 
the eighteenth century. It overflowed the limiting 
traditions of its origin and cut new channels for 
itself. It seems to have divined that Nature in 
the large sense is the test of all things. With a 



44 THE NEW PEACE 

charmed surprise it discovered that the natural is 
the true and the beautiful as well, for the beauti- 
ful is only the splendor of the true, as Plato said; 
and for both truth and beauty it made its appeal 
directly to Nature. It set no boundaries to its 
exploring zeal. It pursued the truth of which it 
was enamored into every nook of the expanding 
universe, and did not hesitate at the threshold of 
that larger universe, the mind of man. When 
Mungo Park asked the Arabs what became of the 
sun at nightfall, they replied that the question was 
beyond human investigation. For this alert nine- 
teenth century intelligence, which had found its 
mission and its method, no phenomenon was be- 
yond investigation, no tradition was unchallenged. 
The sense of mystery attracted it like the impalpa- 
ble drawings of a hidden magnet. A mystery, 
said Sir William Crookes, is a thing to be solved. 
The record of discovery which followed is un- 
matched in all history since the first naive ques- 
tioning of Nature in the childhood of the race. It 
includes the molecular constitution of matter, the 
conservation of energy, the cell structure of ani- 
mals and plants, embryology, the establishment of 
the doctrine of evolution, spectrum analysis and 
its application to celestial physics, the antiquity of 
man and the earth, the application of electricity 
to communication, lighting, machinery, therapeu- 



RESULTS 45 

tics, and chemical research, the railway and steam- 
ship, photography and the phonograph, anaesthet- 
ics, antiseptic surgery, the germ theory of disease 
and sanitation, the Roentgen-rays, the electrical 
atom, electrical waves, and radioactivity. 

It will be seen that, with the exception of gravi- 
tation and the bare beginnings of physics, as- 
tronomy, chemistry, and the biological sciences, 
these generalizations embrace practically the sum 
total of our present knowledge of Nature. 
They are inductions from innumerable observa- 
tions and verifications. They register and reward 
years of toil and waiting on the part of an army 
of self-devoted and widely scattered workers. In 
all its struggle upward out of savagery humanity 
presents no finer spectacle than in scaling the sum- 
mits of nineteenth century science. Every fact 
won, it held to be a great fact. It saw in every 
discovery both acquisition and opportunity, and in 
spite of the taunts of the trivial and the odium of 
the serious, undaunted in the presence of impossi- 
bilities, baffled and wounded, but still ardent and 
courageous, sustained by faith in the intelligibility 
of the universe, it pressed persistently up to where 
its goal of Truth gleamed on the heights. The 
ignorant or the malicious detractor may cry " de- 
pravity and materialism ! " till the stars die out of 
the sky, and to the end this brilliant page of its 



46 THE NEW PEACE 

history will protest in every line of it that human 
nature is not all mud, so long as such consecration 
to a lofty ideal remains possible to it. 

It was inevitable that an expansion of natural 
knowledge so great and, I was about to say, so 
sudden, should give a species of electric shock to 
human life, thrilling it from its central deeps out 
to its thinnest fringes. It was revolutionary. It 
refashioned the external modes of life and made 
imperative the revision and reorganization of ex- 
isting opinions. It put a new expression in the 
face of Nature and our entire physical and ra- 
tional life now wears a new aspect and complexion. 



LECTURE II 
THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 



The experimental sciences had investigated the 
connection of phenomena; they showed how many 
and what kind of links constitute the chain of 
events which connects any cause with its final effect; 
but what it is that holds together any two contigu- 
ous links escaped them; they told neither what 
things are in themselves, nor in what consists that 
action between them by which alone the condi- 
tion of one can become the cause of a change in 
the condition of another. 

— Lotze, Microcosmus, II, 346. 

The function of physical science is seen to be 
much more modest than was at one time supposed. 
We no longer hope by levers and screws to pluck 
out the heart of the mystery of the universe. . . . 
We have given up the notion of causation except 
as a convenient phrase; what were once called laws 
of Nature are now simply rules by which we can 
tell more or less accurately what will be the conse- 
quence of a given state of things. 

— Professor Horace Lamb. 

Presidential Address before the Sec- 
tion of Mathematics and Physics of 
British Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science, 1904. Nature, Aug. 
18, 1904. 



THE SCOPE OF SCIENCE 

ALLUSION has been made to the view that 
science and religion occupy distinct and un- 
related spheres and cannot, therefore, collide. 
Honorable names are associated with it, and up 
to the present time no conception has been quite as 
serviceable in quieting the fears with which relig- 
ious minds have watched the steady progress of 
science. Dr. Martineau among philosophers em- 
ployed it with great eloquence, and George 
Romanes among scientists consoled his troubled 
spirit in his last hours with the independent and 
authoritative witness of the moral faculties. 

Is this the true view? Can we be permanently 
content with marking off sharply from each other 
these two spheres of superlative human interest? 
Will the formal boundary established between 
these provinces remain inviolable, and, while it 
prevents conflict, prevent also the reciprocity of 
friendly influence? When the German bride of 
the French prince, in her progress to Paris, 
reached the historic boundary of the Rhine, she 
entered a pavilion on an island in the middle of 
the stream and exchanged all her German attire 
for an outfit brought from Paris. Are there not 

49 



5 o THE NEW PEACE 

signs that something like this is happening where 
the religious frontier meets the scientific? — the 
maintenance of separateness with all the " stiff 
buckram " of official ceremonial, and at the same 
time the passing to and fro of the most precious 
commerce of the realms? 

This question of spheres is an important one, 
and in this lecture we shall seek to settle it so far 
as the scope and function of science are involved. 
Indeed, our definition of science is incomplete with- 
out such a discussion. 

In September, 1904, there met in St. Louis the 
International Congress of Arts and Science. 
Leading scientists of many nationalities partici- 
pated. The central purpose of the Congress was 
the unification of knowledge. The general prin- 
ciples which underlie and connect all the sciences 
were set forth, together with their historical de- 
velopment and present problems. The classifica- 
tion of the sciences adopted by the Congress is 
serviceable for our present purpose. Seven great 
divisions are recognized: Normative Science, in- 
cluding philosophy and mathematics; Historical 
Science, including political, linguistic, and religious 
history; Physical Science, with the departments of 
physics, chemistry, astronomy, sciences of the 
earth, biology, and anthropology; Mental Science, 
of which sociology is a department; the Utilitarian 



SCOPE 51 

Sciences, as medicine and technology; with two 
final divisions, — Social Regulations and Social 
Culture. 

Such a scheme represents the scope of science as 
it is conceived to-day by those who have right to 
speak in its name. If not side by side, yet within 
that scope lie subjects so diverse as crystals and 
metaphysics, anatomy and psychology, ether and 
ethics, politics and religion, electrical engineering 
and ghosts. There may have been more things 
in heaven and earth than Horatio's philosophy 
dreamt of in the state of Denmark seven hundred 
years ago. But in the presence of such an array 
as this, one may question the truth of the thought- 
ful prince's remark when it is applied to the pres- 
ent time. For wherever there is an object to be 
described or an event to be recorded — whether 
a world flaming in the stellar depths, or an electron 
scintillating in a vacuum tube; the migration of a 
sun system or of a flock of snow-birds, under an 
imperious call from afar — a vibration shooting 
along the old earth's granite ribs or a tense thread 
of nerve; the heaving of the wave to meet the 
moon, a cave plant's struggle for the light, or a 
soul's passion to lie " breast to breast with God " 
— wherever a fact waits for inquiry, wherever the 
search for truth is possible, there lies the sphere of 
science, not its sphere of influence merely, but its 



52 THE NEW PEACE 

own proper territory, the field of its labor. 

It is easy to see that a line runs through the 
midst of these varied facts, separating them into 
two classes, — things and thoughts, outside facts 
and inside facts. Now, it must be remembered 
that our classifications are simply intellectual 
labor-saving devices and that every now and then 
they will not work. Nature is not over-careful 
to conform to our mode of conceiving her, and 
sometimes advances a phase of her manifold ac- 
tivity or a product of her boundless fertility to 
throw our systems into confusion. These things 
and thoughts, deeply divergent as they appear to 
be, might, if we went deeper still, be found to 
blend in a common substratum, as coral islands 
join hands beneath the sea. But in any case, it 
will be convenient to think of them now apart from 
each other. 

i. Outside Facts. The objects and activities of 
the physical universe inorganic and organic supply 
the material of scientific inquiry as it is usually dis- 
tinguished from other forms of inquiry. The 
theologian and the philosopher may delve in other 
regions for the truth they seek, but the man of 
science, while not confined, as we shall see, to the 
external world of the senses, has yet occupied him- 
self mainly with it; so much so that, in the view of 
many, he is in danger of losing credit in proportion 



OUTSIDE FACTS 53 

to the range he allows himself beyond these con- 
fines. If, on the other hand, he keep discreetly 
within sensuous bounds, he is able, only with the 
greatest difficulty, to avoid the opprobrium of low- 
browed materialism. In the study of material 
objects the scientist cannot be content with the 
knowledge of form and structure, but must push 
his inquiry into questions of origin and relations, 
the energies which play upon them and issue from 
them. Nor does he pause when these questions 
are answered. He must know cause and essence 
so far as they are accessible to human faculties. 
For accumulated facts, as we have seen, are not 
science. They require rational treatment. The 
body of scientific truth is, accordingly, the achieve- 
ment of observation and reason in co-operation. 
As one stands before the enlarging mass of facts 
which are yet unrelated in a generalized interpre- 
tation, one feels inclined to ask whether it is worth 
while to add with infinite labor sand grain to sand 
grain for the simple purpose of having a big heap 
of sand rather than a little one. Unfortunately, 
the endowment of research concerns primarily the 
collection of facts, whereas at this stage we ap- 
pear to be in as much need of adequate interpreta- 
tion. Facts? Yes, by the mile of printed page. 
But what do they mean? An earlier period sat 
within and reasoned how things must be, instead 



54 THE NEW PEACE 

of going abroad to see how things were. The 
question of how many teeth a horse had was hotly 
debated through many writings and was on the 
point of leading to bloodshed, when one of the 
writers bethought him at last to look into a horse's 
mouth and count. Learned scientists in the Uni- 
versity of Pisa refused to accept Galileo's discov- 
ery of the moons of Jupiter, on the ground that 
it was impossible that Jupiter should have moons. 
They argued from the analogy of the seven win- 
dows set in the microcosm of the head and from 
" many other phenomena of nature, such as the 
seven metals, etc., that the number of the planets 
is necessarily seven." There was no need to 
look through Galileo's telescope, and they stoutly 
refused to do it. 

We have swung to the opposite extreme. In 
the enthusiasm of our consciously recognized 
method, observers multiply, but interpreters, who 
combine higher capacities, are the gifts of Provi- 
dence only at rare intervals. The Newtons, the 
Lyells, the Helmholtzes, the Darwins, are worth 
waiting for. Perhaps they come as fast as they 
are needed. When the new generalization does 
come to be made, it will rest on a wider induction 
and prove to be all the more luminous and author- 
itative. 

But, it may be asked, is not the external world 



OUTSIDE FACTS $5 

itself a projection of the internal world? and is not 
science, by holding itself so closely to the physical 
order, after all missing the pathway to reality? 
Possibly the Berkeleyan idealist is correct when he 
insists that " things " are only " definite assem- 
blages of states of consciousness," and accordingly 
do not exist apart from the perceiving mind. 
The world, in that case, disappears in mist; be- 
comes, as Fichte said, only a dream of dreams. 
It may be replied that these are conceptions of 
closet philosophers and only need the touch of ex- 
perimental science to evaporate, like their world of 
matter, into thin air. But there are not wanting 
scientists of high repute who maintain a closely 
allied position. The President of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science three 
years ago declared that we do not have and never 
have had any evidence whatever that matter ex- 
ists. And Professor Karl Pearson expresses 
practically the same view. " The mind," he says, 
" is absolutely confined within the walls of its 
nerve exchange; beyond the walls of sense-impres- 
sion it can logically infer nothing." " Immediate 
sense-impressions," he says further, " form perma- 
nent impresses in the brain, which psychically 
correspond to memory. The union of immediate 
sense-impressions with associated stored impres- 
sions leads to the formation of ' constructs ' which 



56 THE NEW PEACE 

we project ' outside ourselves ' and term phe- 
nomena. The real world for us lies in such con- 
structs and not in shadowy things-in-themselves." * 
It so chanced that the evening after the reading 
of this discussion I took, after the sun was down, a 
little jaunt across the railroad, through the pines 
and along the lighted border of the wood as far 
as the brook. I was turning over in my mind 
Pearson's statement that we have no right to in- 
fer order and reason and benevolence and beauty 
outside ourselves, that " chaos is all that science 
can assert of the supersensuous." Just as I 
reached the little brook and its unbroken tangle of 
alders and blackberries and vines, a startled 
cardinal with a rapid twitch, twitch, twitch, flew 
out of a sheltering grape arbor at my side. I 
thought how delightful a spot he had chosen for 
sleep. The water slipping over the little ford 
made only enough of its soft murmuring among 
the pebbles to wake him if it should suddenly cease. 
The flute-like trills of a hundred white tree- 
crickets, clear and full but caressing, would surely 
allay any fever of excitement which the day had 
left in his brain. And over-head the moon with 
one bright attendant had already cleared the 
shoulder of the pine wood on the slope to the 
southeastward, and was ready in a heaven all 

1 Grammar of Science, 75, 107, 108. 



OUTSIDE FACTS 57 

sweet and fair to watch his sleep the whole night 
through. When I turned homeward to the west 
the sky line burned red through a bit of pine 
crowning the hill, and higher up a radiant saffron 
haze all but quenched the steady flame of Venus 
for a minute or two, then followed its lord over 
the rim of the world. Farther on a lamp beamed 
upon me through the door of a humble home and 
just beyond it a locomotive, with brutal self- 
assertiveness, broke in upon Nature's passive 
serenity. 

Unwittingly I had brought my scientist's prob- 
lem out into the midst of an epitome of universal 
nature. The engine was the symbol of toiling and 
moiling man and his battle for bread and pelf; 
the cottage spoke to me of love and consecration; 
and the frightened bird, the care-free insect, the 
glooming wood beneath, and the glowing planets 
on high were witnesses of all Nature's realms and 
provinces. I said, Can it be that the beauty which 
I admire here is all my own, being purely con- 
ceptual? that the order and adaptation and pur- 
pose which thrill in my mind in this particular ex- 
ternal situation are not my discoveries, but my 
creations? Can it be that the sense-impressions 
that rouse in me the feeling of rationality and 
harmony spring themselves out of blank chaos? 
And this conceiving mind which works such mar- 



58 THE NEW PEACE 

vels out of chaotic materials — whence came it? 
How comes it to be just here now, not only 
ordered but ordering? Is mind the offspring of 
mindless chaos? 

Allow that matter is not reality, but only phe- 
nomenon. It must nevertheless express and sym- 
bolize reality one or more removes back of it. 
This ground reality which we are never able to 
see as it is, whose robes flowing through the world 
we glimpse here and there, whose shadow is the 
stage of our life drama and the field of the 
scientific quest, this ground reality may be in- 
scrutable in itself, inaccessible to our present ex- 
ploration outfit; but it does not follow that it is 
non-existent. There are, in fact, three independ- 
ent witnesses to the reality of the external world, 
— one theoretical and two practical. Theoretic- 
ally considered " the reality of the external world 
is the necessary presupposition of the logical 
sequence of the phenomena of consciousness." 
One practical proof is presented in the external 
results of our inward willing. Sense-perceptions 
answer accurately to the inner effort. For ex- 
ample, in the case of voluntary muscular move- 
ment, the ego is conscious of being resisted by 
something distinct from itself, as Dr. Johnson 
is said to have refuted the idealism of Berkeley 
by kicking a stone; or in the case of pain we 



INSIDE FACTS 59 

know that our will is obstructed by a cause which 
does not lie in it and which must be, therefore, 
an activity outside ourselves. Another practical 
proof of the reality of the external world we have 
in the observed relations of objects to one an- 
other. The moon, for example, influences the 
tides on the earth. Clearly this influence was in 
operation before any human consciousness had 
arrived to make such a u projection " of an in- 
ward state. Uranus and Neptune did not begin 
to disturb one another in 1846 when Neptune was 
discovered. 

2. Inside Facts. To a few men of science 
like Ernst Haeckel, the world of things is the 
only real world; there is nothing in the universe 
except " space-filling matter and active energy." 
The manifestations of mental life are reducible 
to terms of nervous energy and are as much bound 
up with neuroplasm as the mechanical energy 
of muscle is with the contractile myaloplasm. In 
other words, mind is the physiological function 
of the cells in certain parts of the cerebral cortex, 
in the same sense as contractility is the physio- 
logical function of muscle cells. And yet when 
Haeckel makes sensation, like movement, an at- 
tribute of all matter for the purposes of his monis- 
tic theory, does he not tacitly admit in another 
form the reality of the thought world, which, on 



6o THE NEW PEACE 

the dualistic theory, is only differently related to 
the world of objects? In fact, he says explicitly 
that the strenuous opposition between modern 
monism and traditional dualism may be toned 
down — may, indeed, be converted into a friendly 
harmony. In recalling this language of his Rid- 
dle of the Universe of 1899, he assures us in 
1905 {The Wonders of Life) that "this con- 
ciliatory disposition has grown stronger and 
stronger " in the interval. Accordingly, one is 
not surprised to read a few sentences farther on, 
" Our realist philosophy of life teaches us that 
our ideals are rooted deep in human nature." 

Now, it is to be observed that on any theory 
the inside world is no whit less real than the out- 
side world. Suppose with Haeckel that the trinity 
of substance is composed of matter, force, and 
sensation with its elaboration in the phenomena 
of consciousness; or suppose with Ernst Mach 
that u matter " is only a mental symbol for a 
complex of sensuous elements, the universe con- 
sisting only of force and consciousness; or again 
suppose with Ostwald that consciousness is but 
a special case of force or energy, which alone 
constitutes the universe; — in any case, the world 
of thought and feeling is still a world of fact. 
As such it lies open to scientific exploration. 

The method of science is the same here as in 



INSIDE FACTS 61 

the outside world. For the method of intro- 
spection which is so important here, is, after all, 
only observation with its eyes turned inward. 
But the conceptual symbols devised to aid us in 
the study of physics or chemistry, such as atoms, 
molecules, and the conservation of energy, are 
likely to prove inapplicable when we pass to a 
different order of facts. We have need to re- 
member always, as Mach has pointed out, 2 that 
these devices by which we seek to reproduce facts 
in thought are, like the symbols of algebra, ca- 
pable of yielding only what we put into them. 
They do not exist except in our minds, and have 
no value or validity save as short-hand representa- 
tions in thought of the world of experience. A 
new province of that world will require new sym- 
bols. In the sphere of mental life the atomic 
theory is out of place and can render no service. 
Nobody expects to " find the secret of genius or 
the moral law in the bottom of a retort." No 
Newton or Leibnitz has yet arisen to give al- 
gebraic expression to variations in the states of 
consciousness. The deep affinity which draws 
two spirits together does not vary inversely as 
the square of the distance. The world of emo- 
tion and idea remains incapable of mathematical 
analysis, in spite of the hopes which were raised 

2 Analysis of the Sensations, passim. 



62 THE NEW PEACE 

fifty years ago by the work of Weber and Fech- 
ner on sensation. Too little is as yet known in 
this high region for the fashioning of conceptual 
keys to unlock its problems. It is frankly con- 
fessed that its central problem can be approached 
at present only by way of theories known to be 
inadequate and unsubstantiated by facts. 

And yet science is pushing out into this world 
of mystery. It has taken up its task. Its con- 
fession of ignorance is no longer held to justify 
the preemptive claim of metaphysics and theology 
to all the rights and charters of exploration. For 
1,300 years the sacred capital of Tibet was 
guarded against invasion by a system of espionage 
and penalties, so that in that period not more than 
twenty foreigners had passed within its walls. 
But in August last the British flag was unfurled 
in Lhasa, and when the treaty had been signed, 
the lime-light photograph taken in the council 
chamber of the Potala dispelled the last mystery 
of the Asian continent. With the sense of re- 
sponsibility and under the splendid fascination of 
an extremely difficult task, science has struck tent 
at the Indian border and is off for the roof of the 
world. 

We conclude, therefore, with Professor Pear- 
son, that the legitimate field of science embraces 
all the mental and physical facts of the universe. 



FUNCTION 63 

The Function of Science 

We have now to inquire into the work which 
science does in its proper field. What is its bus- 
iness? its aim? What do these delving men of 
science seek? What is precisely the task which 
they propose to themselves? 

From his first awaking to self-consciousness 
man has been infected and his life has been 
moulded by an insatiable curiosity in the presence 
of the mysteries around him and within him. 
The universe of air and sky, the multitudinous 
sea, the teeming earth, the secret stirrings of his 
own nature, have been a lure and a challenge to 
his capacity, and according to the level to which 
he had risen, he answered with animism and taboo, 
with myth and magic and theology. These an- 
swers, as has been already remarked, are all forms 
of primitive science into the structure of which 
religion enters as an inextricable constituent. 
Even after these thousands of years we are still 
under Nature's spell, and 

Those stark wastes that whiten endlessly 
In ghastly solitude about the pole, 

awe and fascinate us as the herds of cloud cattle 
pasturing in the plains of heaven, or the marvel 
of the dawn, awed and fascinated our forebears 
in their early Aryan home. We cannot be content 



64 THE NEW PEACE 

while under our feet miles within the earth secrets 
slumber or now and then stir to send a defiant 
tremor through its frame; we must needs sink a 
well into the midst of them, and if it go twelve 
miles deep and cost two millions of treasure ac- 
cording to a recent proposal, so much the better. 
We shall learn more than if we laid open the secret 
of either pole. And this wondrous personality, 
which is always with us like a veiled presence, 
whispers tauntingly behind its disguise, " closer 
am I than all, and even yet unknown " ; and vol- 
ume succeeds volume into the thousands, some of 
observation, others of reflection, all striving to 
lift a corner or peer through a mesh of the veil 
which hides us from ourselves. 

The will to know is a human characteristic, 
and Dante's explanation is as good as any we 
might offer to-day: "The reason whereof may 
be that each thing, impelled by its own natural 
foresight, inclines to its own perfection; where- 
fore, inasmuch as knowledge is the distinguish- 
ing perfection of our soul, wherein consists our 
distinguishing blessedness, all of us are naturally 
subject to the longing for it." This inherent love 
of knowledge drives us out upon our quest, this 
is the fountain out of which the stream of science 
flows. But in what does knowledge consist? 
When may this natural craving be said to be met? 



FUNCTION 65 

In the words of the great philosopher-physicist 
of Vienna, " Every practical and intellectual need 
is satisfied the moment our thoughts have acquired 
the power to represent the facts of the senses 
completely. Our knowledge of a natural phe- 
nomenon is as complete as possible when our 
thoughts so marshal before the eye of the mind 
all the relevant sense-given facts of the case that 
they may be regarded almost as a substitute for 
these facts, and the facts appear to us as old 
familiar figures, having no power to occasion sur- 
prise." 3 Such a mental picturing of the facts 
of nature is the end and aim of science. This 
is all we can legitimately mean by explanation, as 
indeed the etymology of the term suggests. It 
means to make thoroughly plain, i. e., flat, involv- 
ing the removal of obstructions and irregulari- 
ties; consequently, to make evident, visible to the 
mental eye. Accordingly, a natural phenomenon 
is explained when we are able to reproduce in 
thought its place in the stream of events, its 
antecedents and its consequents, and feel no need 
of further inquiry. The phenomenon of old 
age, for example, is explained in the scientific 
sense, as soon as we can picture to ourselves the 
following sequence of histological events: the 
growing flaccidity and vacuolation of nerve, mus- 

3 Ernst Mach, "Analysis of the Sensations," p. 154. 



66 THE NEW PEACE 

cle, and gland cells, the invasion and destruction 
of these wasted cells by phagocytes from the 
blood, the filling of the spaces of these destroyed 
cells by the supporting tissue until the essential 
tissue of the organ is replaced by a tissue inca- 
pable of discharging the proper function of that 
organ. Hence, mental decline, muscular weak- 
ness, scant secretions, defective circulation. 

Now, it is of the highest importance to observe 
that what we have here is only history; it is simply 
the description of a certain sequence of events. 
Old age is explained, you will observe, only in 
the sense of " the descriptive how," but not in 
the sense of " the determinative why" We un- 
derstand, i.e., see mentally, how decrepitude comes 
on, not why it comes on. A moment ago we 
" felt no need of further inquiry," but do we not 
now see that another question does actually arise? 
The phagocytes eat up the brain cells — why? 
Why this self-defeating cannibalism among the 
members of the cell-state in one organism? The 
brain cells lose their plump outline and the pro- 
toplasm grows watery — why? Why should the 
neat equilibrium of repair and waste be upset at 
three-score and ten? Why this particular se- 
quence of events rather than some other? 

" As a matter of fact, never in any explanation 
do we reach a point where another question may 



LIMITATION 67 

not or does not arise, and in the end, whatever 
the nature of our inquiry, we are brought to a 
stand by ultimate questions which cannot, like 
their predecessors, be made fresh starting-points, 
and yet are no true intellectual resting-places." 
It is precisely at this point that the limitations of 
science emerge. And they become all the more 
manifest, if with the late distinguished president 
of the British Association we go farther and in- 
sist that the function of science is not merely the 
discovery of the co-existences and sequences be- 
tween phenomena, but the framing of a concep- 
tion of the universe in its inner reality. For 
science, with all its apparatus of formula and 
method, with all its enthusiasm and penetration, 
stands before this ultimate reality as helpless as 
was primeval man in the presence of the starry 
heavens or the springtime's verdant resurrection. 
The riddle of consciousness itself is no farther 
from solution than the riddle of the ultimate 
reality of physical nature. A so-called law of 
nature, the discovery of which is, so far at least, 
the highest achievement of science, is nothing 
more than " a brief expression of the relation- 
ships and sequences of certain groups of percep- 
tions and conceptions " ; in other words, " a rule 
by which we can tell more or less accurately what 
will be the consequence of a given state of 



68 THE NEW PEACE 

things." It does not touch the bond of connec- 
tion which holds event to event in an endless 
chain, nor the essence of the material of its in- 
dividual links. Absolute causation and essence 
are both beyond the reach of the scientific plum- 
met. Newton's law of gravitation is perhaps the 
greatest of all scientific discoveries, but the nature 
of gravity is as much an enigma to-day as it was 
to Newton. 

Make the rounds of your fine laboratories 
where Science sits enthroned among her devotees. 
Put a few questions and mark the monotony of 
the answers. *Here is a marvellous conjunction 
of crystal and brass, and in the path of the beam 
of light which traverses it lies a growing egg. 
Ask the dividing nucleus how knoweth it mathe- 
matics and mechanics, having never learned. Its 
sole response is the silent and uninterrupted dis- 
play of its mathematics and mechanics, dividing 
and distributing with precision its mysterious 
chromatic substance. Turn to the beaming biolo- 
gist at your side and ask what it is that sets this 
bit of matter over against the whole realm of 
inorganic nature. He will answer, " Life." 
" But what is that? " " I do not know." Ask 
his neighbor the chemist what he means by his 
oft-invoked and much-loved chemical affinity. 
With some preliminary skirmishing about atoms 



LIMITATION 69 

and ions he will at last reply, " I do not know." 
Cross the campus and ply the physicist with the 
question "What is light?" "Light is radiant 
energy propagated by vibrations of the ether." 
" Yes, but what is the ether and why does it vi- 
brate? " He cannot get beyond Lord Salisbury's 
famous definition, " Ether is the nominative case 
of the verb to undulate," and dismisses you with 
u I do not know." The psychologist has a nim- 
ble wit, but with persistence and care it may at 
length be cornered on the question " What is 
thought?" He may begin with the parallelism 
of the nerve process and the thought process, 
antomatism or interactionism, but he will end with 
the confession, " I do not know." 

It must be apparent that it is precisely at the 
crucial point in every line of research that the 
scientific method breaks down. When the great 
French chemist said, " The word mystery is ex- 
cluded from scientific language and methods," he 
did not mean to say that science had now ascer- 
tained the causes of all phenomena, but simply 
that there were no phenomena without causes. 
Indeed, the farther the man of science pushes his 
questioning of Nature, the more oppressed he be- 
comes with the limitations of science, and the 
word most familiar to his tongue is, " I do not 
know." It is true that the torch of science grows 



70 THE NEW PEACE 

brighter with each passing year and shoots its 
rays deeper into the enveloping darkness; but the 
enlargement of the sphere of light is, from an- 
other view-point, the multiplication of the points 
of its contact with the unknown. One secret 
guessed brings to view two deeper ones; Science 
springs more questions than she solves. 

Deep under deep forever goes, 
Heaven over heaven expands. 

In front of every gate out of our modern Thebes 
sits a Sphinx with an unsolved riddle. Even 
that modern CEdipus, Ernst Haeckel, essaying at 
the close of the nineteenth century to summarize its 
teaching and to solve " the riddle of the Uni- 
verse," does not claim to offer a perfect solution 
of it, but only to show, as he himself says, how 
nearly we have approached to " that immeasur- 
ably distant goal." After sixty-five years of 
added scientific progress, we have still preserved 
to us Carlyle's " great, deep, sacred, infinitude 
of Nescience, whither we can never penetrate, on 
which science swims as a mere superficial film." 
His word of 1840 is true to-day: "This world, 
after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; 
wonderful, inscrutable, magical, and more." 



RELATIONS 71 

The Relations of Science 

We have now dealt with the content, method, 
results, scope, and function of science. This sur- 
vey has perhaps prepared us for the considera- 
tion of the relations which it sustains to life. 
This subject will contribute to the clearness and 
fullness of our view of what science is in itself, 
and you see that it involves directly the matter 
with which this lectureship is concerned. Let us 
think of science and life in three particular aspects 
of life, — physical well-being, culture, and relig- 
ion. The first two will occupy us for the re- 
mainder of this hour; the last will best be post- 
poned to the later lectures. 

Manifestly the closest bonds exist between 
science and life in all its expressions. The aris- 
tocratic science of mathematics, self-sufficient and 
abstract, may indeed have established but slight 
connections with the actual world of experience. 
An eminent cultivator and apologist of this high 
science has declared 4 that its results are inde- 
pendent of the direction which the development 
of civilization has taken on this planet, — so ab- 
solute and independent, in fact, that its truths 
would afford the only basis of an understanding 
with any intelligent beings on other planets. And 

*Prof. H. Schubert, The Monist, Jan., 1896. 



72 THE NEW PEACE 

yet even pure mathematics may turn to practical 
account as an aid in the progress of the other 
sciences. For it is probably true that modern sci- 
ence is most clearly differentiated from the vague 
guesses of the ancient philosophers and poets by 
the mathematical spirit, with its effort to measure 
and to count. Clerk-Maxwell said that the clock, 
the balance, and the foot-rule are the symbols of 
the scientific method. Certainly, in the case of 
all the other sciences, the relation to the varied 
modes and expressions of life is direct and close 
and marked by the interplay of reciprocal in- 
fluence. 

i. Science and Physical Well-Being. Of 
course, the most obvious relationship is presented 
in the practical ministry of science to life on its 
physical side. The evidences of this ministry are 
so abundant and so striking as to leave no ground 
to-day for that old disparagement that science 
stands aloof from life. It must, indeed, be ad- 
mitted that the aim of science is the discovery 
of the rational order of the universe, with no 
utilitarian purpose beyond it; to find the truth 
of Nature for the joy of the quest, as well as 
for the inherent good of holding, it. In fact, 
the investigator who sets himself the task of dis- 
covering something useful handicaps his research 
at the start and is rarely able to keep to the path 



EXTERNALS 73 

of his generous purpose. It has turned out, ac- 
cordingly, that in most cases the man who cul- 
tivates pure science and the man who cultivates 
applied science are not the same. As Bacon 
said long ago in the very treatise which made 
utility the only justification of science, " the ad- 
vancement of science is the work of a powerful 
genius, the prize and reward belong to the vul- 
gar." And yet, remote as pure science investi- 
gation appears to be from a fruitful application in 
the hands of the inventor, it is in reality the con- 
dition and the germ of every such application. 
When Maxwell in 1873 made his great discovery 
of the electro-magnetic nature of heat and light, 
he did not foresee wireless telegraphy in it. 
Nevertheless, no Maxwell, no Marconi. We 
cannot predict definitely the practical service which 
the pure science work of Becquerel and the Curies 
will yield, though we may not question its high 
promise. Even if it do not turn to taxable prop- 
erty, it will minister to the higher utilities of in- 
tellectual satisfaction and resource. 

Within the memory of some of you science has 
wrought more change in the conditions of life 
than was witnessed in the previous thousand years. 
It has raised the standard of comfort. We are 
reckoned to be sixteen times more comfortable 
than our grandparents were in 1850. Science has 



74 THE NEW PEACE 

lengthened by some six or eight years the average 
duration of human life. What is more impor- 
tant, it has heightened its efficiency ten- to fifty- 
fold, by improving its external conditions and by 
putting into its hand new forces and instruments. 
The rapidity and ease of communication would 
seem fabulous, if they were not familiar. Sec- 
tional and national barriers, if not boundaries, 
are fast dissolving. You have observed how 
quickly local questions become national, and na- 
tional questions international. I am not sure that 
the control of Nature with which science has 
equipped us, its defenses against the enemies of 
our life that impair its tone and dissipate its en- 
ergies, and the light which it is beginning to shed 
on the obscure problems of heredity, — I am not 
sure that these things do not warrant the hope of 
some improvement in the race itself, in its sub- 
stance and texture over and above the enhancing 
of its physical well-being. Few serious persons 
will venture to set limits to the new science of 
Eugenics which the indefatigable Sir Francis 
Galton is promoting. It deals with all the in- 
fluences which improve and develop the inborn 
qualities of a race. 

Of what value after all is the ministry of sci- 
ence to life, if it exhaust itself upon externals? 
A traveller in India reports that it is no uncom- 



CULTURE 75 

mon thing to see a Naga from the upper valleys 
of the Brahmaputra, who but a few years ago 
was a naked head-hunting savage, now clad in 
a tweed coat and carrying a Manchester um- 
brella buying his ticket at a railway station. One 
cannot but fear that, in spite of his finery, he is 
a head-hunter still. Does science stop short with 
the decoration of life, and leave untouched its 
interior and real interests, its thoughts and feel- 
ings, its outlook and ideals, its abiding satisfac- 
tions and the higher forms of its expression? 
Does science bear gifts to business, and stand 
with empty hands before culture ? 

2. Science and Culture. We shall discover the 
relations which science bears to culture, if we con- 
sider the means of culture in education and the ex- 
pression of culture in literature and art. 

The educational curriculum in its present form 
is the result of a gradual growth from very 
ancient and rude beginnings. As in the case of 
a living organism, its successive modifications 
have been closely dependent upon its environment. 
Accordingly, the culture apparatus and methods 
of one period and race differ more or less widely 
from those of other periods and races. The his- 
tory of this development is intertwined with the 
progress of external events. Of course, the 
widening and deepening of natural knowledge in 



76 THE NEW PEACE 

our time multiplied the subjects of study, and each 
new-comer at once challenged the preemptive 
right of its predecessors to the whole field of edu- 
cation. Many of the new subjects, moreover, 
yielded themselves with great hopefulness to the 
function of mental culture and had, besides, an 
important bearing on the practical conduct of life. 
At first a natural conservatism asserted itself in 
resisting any breach of the classico-mathematical 
discipline, but gradually gave over the struggle 
first in the universities, then in the colleges and 
secondary schools, and finally in the primary 
schools. The battle of the sciences for recogni- 
tion in the schools is won. Universally won in 
theory, but the actual occupation of all the con- 
quered territory is yet to be effected. The hu- 
manities have not been displaced and ought never 
to be, perhaps; but they have been forced to 
make room for the sciences, which have now been 
introduced into every stage of the educational 
process. Three results have followed : — The 
rigidity of the form of education has been relaxed, 
and a rational adaptation to individual capacity 
and need has become possible; we have acquired 
a new standard of educational values; and, lastly, 
the older subjects, rejuvenated by the contagious 
method of science, have now a new view-point 
and a changed emphasis, and have made immense 



CULTURE 77 

gains in interest, in culture value, and in vitality. 

If we pass from the tools of education to the 
art of using them, we shall have to own that there 
has been some disappointment of the hopes which 
were raised by science. For the old problems of 
educational method remain and there is yet a 
distressing waste of time and the raw material 
in the educational process. Little children even 
to-day would seem to have much occasion to be 
thankful for. that " special providence " which not 
only " watches over them," but somehow gets 
them educated in spite of their teachers. Per- 
haps we have blundered in ever supposing that 
the art of education, any more than other prov- 
inces of life, could be reduced to the mechanical 
exactitude of formal science. And yet is there 
not a discernible movement of that art in the di- 
rection of science? The scientific study of the 
contents and development of the child mind, 
though but just begun, has thrown light upon its 
normal interests and its successively arising needs, 
and has materially transformed educational theory 
and practice for the better. And it would be un- 
fair and unwise to discredit so soon in the field 
of education a method which has been uniformly 
successful elsewhere. 

Literature is the exponent and standard of cul- 
ture. It is one of the chief forms in which the 



78 THE NEW PEACE 

higher capacities of man shine out and make 
record of themselves. Do its contemporary- 
phases show any traces of the scientific revolu- 
tion? How has it responded to the pressure of 
the new knowledge ? 

In a period whose intellectual interests lie pre- 
vailingly in the body of scientific truth, when 
science is the support and comfort of the humblest 
life, as well as the basis of wellnigh the whole of 
our thinking, one would expect the rise of what 
we may be permitted to call — pace Mr. Matthew 
Arnold — a distinctively scientific literature. It 
has come, and in enormous volume. There is, 
besides, a deep tinge of science in the highest 
forms of recent literature, as in Tennyson and 
Browning, while the problems of sociology, psy- 
chology, and heredity often supply the motif of 
popular fiction. 

Of course, the history of the literary response 
to the touch of science is complicated by the co- 
existence of widely different attitudes and the sur- 
vival into a later time of impressions and effects 
which logically belong to an earlier stage of the 
development. Let me suggest the chief stages 
of this logical development. 5 The first contact 
of the new knowledge with literature awakened 

5 Quoted with some expansion from the author's " Laboratory 
and Pulpit," 36, 37. 



CULTURE 79 

the fear that the poetry of life, its sentiments and 
ideals, would be rudely dealt with by the hard and 
ifierce man of science who bustled on to the stage 
with the chatter of instruments, with a pigeon- 
hole and a physical test for very phenomenon of 
the soul. In 1829 Edgar Poe cried out to science, 

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart, 
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities? 

About the same time Keats revolted no less 
strongly against the ruthless extension of scientific 
explanation, which seemed to him to break the 
wing of imagination and to destroy the beauty 
of the world by dissecting it. The feeling is 
finely delineated more recently by Walt Whit- 
man: — 

When I heard the learn'd astronomer; 

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns 

before me ; 
When I was shown the charts, and diagrams, to add, divide, 

and measure them; 
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured 

with much applause in the lecture-room; 
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick, 
Till rising and gliding out, I wandered off by myself, 
In the mystical moist night air, and from time to time 
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars. 

And what severer indictment could be brought 
against science than this of Amiel, certainly one 
of the most brilliant and deeply instructed of 



80 THE NEW PEACE 

modern critics, who, in deprecation of what he 
calls the laboratory smell of Taine's " English 
Literature," says, " I imagine this kind of thing 
will be the literature of the future, ... as differ- 
ent as possible from Greek art, giving us algebra 
instead of life, the formula instead of the image, 
the exhalations of the crucible, instead of the 
divine madness of Apollo. Cold vision will re- 
place the joys of thought, and we shall see the 
death of poetry, flayed and dissected by science." 
Following this stage of fear and revulsion 
come bewilderment and pessimism at sight of 
Nature " red in tooth and claw with ravine," and 
the deep tragedy of life palpitating in the grasp 
of inexorable law: — as Thomson puts it in " The 
City of the Dreadful Night," 

The sense that every struggle brings defeat, 
Because Fate holds no prize to crown success; 

That all the oracles are dumb or cheat, 
Because they have no secret to express. 

The feeling often shadows the brow of Tenny- 
son and is the characteristic note of Arnold and 
" the scornful yet terrified " Byron. The com- 
plete surrender to the scientific impression is seen 
in the naturalism of Zola and Thomas Hardy, 
who frankly accepted and utilized the new knowl- 
edge, turning it into the bricks and mud of realism. 
After it follows the transfiguration of Nature 



CULTURE 8 1 

such as one finds in Richard Jefferies, George 
McDonald, and Watts-Dunton. The final stage 
of sympathetic response and adjustment is reached 
when genius awakes to the new material which 
science lays at its feet, and is kindled into trium- 
phant faith and optimism by the wide vision of 
evolution. That is precisely the distinction of 
Robert Browning. 

It is interesting to observe that this issue was 
divined by Wordsworth's infallible insight before 
the development which I have sketched begun. 
In the preface of the " Lyrical Ballads " (1800) 
he wrote : " Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of 
all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression 
which is in the countenance of all science. . . . 
If the labors of men of science should ever create 
any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our 
condition and in the impressions which we habit- 
ually receive, the poet will sleep then no more 
than at present; he will be ready to follow the 
steps of the man of science, . . . carrying sensa- 
tion into the midst of the objects of the science 
itself." 

Against such high authority and the testimony 
of recent literary history, the question is still 
asked, can poetry survive in the cold white light 
of science? Does not imagination, which is the 
real poet, pass with mystery into banishment 



82 THE NEW PEACE 

under the decree of science? Was not the early 
protest of the poets just and rational, after all? 
It may be replied, in the first place, that the 
work of the scientific investigator and the work 
of the poet, so far from being incompatible and 
mutually exclusive, show, if one look beneath the 
surface, a deep and inherent affinity. As I have 
pointed out, the process of a research is briefly 
this: "Observation starts a hypothesis and ex- 
periment tests whether the hypothesis be true or 
no." In his " Life of Claude Bernard," Sir 
Michael Foster says: " It is in the putting forth 
the hypothesis that the true man of science shows 
the creative power which makes him and the poet 
brothers. He must be a sensitive soul ready to 
vibrate to Nature's touches. Before the dull eye 
of the ordinary man facts pass one after another 
in long procession, but pass without effect, awak- 
ening nothing. In the eye of the man of genius, 
be he poet or man of science, the same facts light 
up an illumination, in the one of beauty, in the 
other of truth. Each possesses a responsive im- 
agination. Such," he continues, " had Bernard, 
and the responses which in his youth found ex- 
pression in verse, in his maturer and trained mind 
took on the form of scientific hypotheses." 6 

Cf. Balzac, " Wild Ass' Skin,"—" Is not Cuvier the great 
poet of our era? " 



CULTURE 83 

Moreover, let us not confound the activity of 
the poetic imagination with the materials which 
it employs. Surely it is not an owl — this high- 
est of our powers — an owl getting abroad only 
in the dark, and limited in its range by certain 
traditional boundaries. It is, indeed, true, as 
Edgar Poe lamented, that the day-spring of 
scientific truth has driven the hamadryad from 
the wood, the naiad from her flood, and the elfin 
from the green grass, except perhaps in Norway 
at the limit of European civilization, on the out- 
skirts of which, we are told, the great primitive 
gods still dwell and where elves and fairies and 
mermaids are still regarded as domestic animals. 
But if the fairies are gone, are there no " fairy 
tales of science," to use a phrase of Tennyson's? 
Wherefore should the poets, says Browning, seek 
to — 

Recapture ancient fable that escapes, 
Push back reality, repeople earth 
With vanished falseness, recognize no worth 
In fact new-born unless 'tis rendered back 
Pallid with fancy. . . . 

Let things be — not seem, 
I counsel rather, — do, and nowise dream ! 
Earth's young significance is all to learn. 

The banishment of the pretty fictions of the Greek 
and Scandinavian mythology, which, it may be 
observed, have been in exile now many centuries, 



84 THE NEW PEACE 

in no way impoverishes the imagination. In- 
deed, this great instrument of scientific progress 
has not only been trained by it, but has been en- 
riched by a wealth of materials which endows it 
for the highest possible creative tasks. If it still 
require for stimulus and food the sense of wonder, 
it need not stop with Lowell's crumb — 

Faith and wonder and the primal earth 
Are born into the world with every child, — 

but press on into the deeper physics and biology 
of the day to find mystery still at the heart of 
universal Nature, and the sum of things more 
vital, more wonderful, more majestic and beau- 
tiful than ever it was in the twilight of the sciences. 
Imagination has reconstructed the geological past 
of the earth and the systems of the world of 
stars. The possibility of a similar inductive 
knowledge of the future has scientific sanction, 
and what a world for imagination is there : — 
The new element for the vacant space in Men- 
deleef's table, the new planet which vexes its 
sister in the dark, the new flower or fruit asleep 
in divergent types, the new light about to spring, 
the new society coming forward out of the future 
to meet us, the fascinating question, What is to 
come after man? 

Permit me to add that the hypothesis which 



CULTURE 85 

these observations suggest, namely, that the prog- 
ress of science has not been unfavorable to crea- 
tive literature, has been already verified by the 
test of experiment. Neither the quantity nor the 
quality of poetry shows any abatement under the 
influence of the all-conquering science of our time. 
Art is so closely akin to the highest literary 
form that it is not necessary to speak in detail of 
its relation to science. De Quincey's classic dis- 
tinction between the literature of power and the 
literature of knowledge is exactly paralleled by 
Ruskin's distinction of two sorts of painting. 
The literature of knowledge, according to De 
Quincey, merely transcribes the fact, nothing 
more; the literature of power gives us, not the 
fact, but the writer's sense of the fact, or, as 
Browning puts it, " fuses his live soul and that 
inert stuff." It is just the difference between 
chronicle and history, between a coast survey and 
Wordsworth's sonnet, with its " gentleness of 
heaven is on the sea " and its " Nun breathless 
with adoration." And so Ruskin speaks of topo- 
graphical and mechanical painting, which is con- 
cerned only to reproduce faithfully every detail 
of a landscape as it is, and, on the other hand, a 
totally different kind of painting, which gives not 
the actual facts of the artist's subject, but the im- 
pression which it made on his mind. I need not 



86 THE NEW PEACE 

remind you that the literature of power is the only 
kind of literature, and that a camera is not an 
artist. Any work of art, whether pictorial or 
plastic or poetical, is primarily a reflection, not 
of the external world, but of the soul of the artist. 

It is clear, therefore, that the artistic impulse, 
like the brush and chisel which in secluded studios 
beautified Florence even while the populace were 
fighting in the barricaded streets, is " safe in un- 
contaminate reserve " against any outward vio- 
lence. Safe also, so long as imagination and emo- 
tion are essential features of human nature, 
against deterioration into the camera type; for 
it cannot deny itself. So far from reducing art 
to one of its own branches to record the demon- 
strable fact like a sensitive machine as Zola proph- 
esied it would do, science in reality widens the 
horizon of art and deepens its penetration and 
enlarges the treasury of ideas from which its emo- 
tion may flow out into forms of beauty. 

And here again the actual history is available 
to test the validity of these antecedent considera- 
tions. At the beginning of the Victorian era 
stagnation is said to have characterized the art 
of England, while contemporaneously with the 
scientific development of that era there was a 
revival of English art, and to-day the critics recog- 
nize an English school of art. It was, therefore, 



CULTURE 87 

fitting and symbolic of contemporary culture that 
John Ruskin, the herald and prophet of the re- 
vival of English art, should have designed, as he 
himself tells us, the first window of the facade 
of the museum of Oxford, in which was inaugu- 
rated the study of natural science in England, in 
true fellowship with literature. 



LECTURE III 
SCIENCE IN RELIGION 



My own East! 
How nearer God we were! He glows above 
With scarce an intervention, presses close 
And palpitatingly, his soul o'er ours; 
We feel him, nor by painful reason know. 

— Browning, Luria. 

Science was Faith once; Faith were Science now, 
Would she but lay her bow and arrows by 
And arm her zvith the weapons of the time. 

— Lowell, The Cathedral. 



SCIENCE IN RELIGION 

THE concluding part of the last lecture was 
an inquiry into the relation of science to 
physical well-being and to culture. We come now 
to ask how science stands related to the highest 
expression which life takes, — its response to the 
call of the universal Spirit behind and within all 
nature. How has the religious life fared during 
the reconstruction of the economic and intellectual 
life? Has faith lost its way in our roomier uni- 
verse? Does it find the new climate wholesome? 
Is it able to live and thrive in this scientific at- 
mosphere ? 

In observance of the Socratic dictum quoted 
early in our joint studies and in preparation for 
this last inquiry, we need to seek a definition of re- 
ligion, at least to make sure of what we mean 
when we use the term. Whereupon I think we 
shall find science in religion and religion in science. 
I am venturing, I know, to speak of music in 
the presence of Wagner. But I remember that 
the simple hop-waltz, the jig, and the folk-song 
have in the hands of the music-masters grown up 
into the classic form of the symphony. May I 
suggest, in further extenuation of this rashness, 

91 



92 THE NEW PEACE 

that the combination of the non-professional with 
the professional view, especially in a matter so 
deeply human as religion, may issue in a stereo- 
scopic solidity and clearness of outline which 
either view alone might lack. Moreover, the 
present discussion may seem in your expert eyes 
to be the less presumptuous, if you will be good 
enough to remember that it aims to set forth a 
particular aspect of the non-professional view, 
treating religion as a natural phenomenon and 
approaching it from the side of natural history. 

What is Religion? 

There are said to be ten thousand definitions 
of religion. I have no wish to add another. For 
the practical purposes of the religious experience 
they might all be dispensed with. The race of 
men endowed with the highest religious genius 
was least given to speculation. Conduct, not 
abstract truth, is the concern of the Hebrew; 
life, not the philosophy of life. He felt little 
need to translate into terms of intellect the facts 
of the inward experience. His interest and effort 
were all discharged upon the experience itself. 
Accordingly, we shall look in vain for formal 
definitions in the Bible. We do find in the Old 
Testament concrete descriptions of the ideal life, 
as in Micah: He hath shown thee, O man, what 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 93 

is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, 
but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly with thy God? And in the New Testa- 
ment Jesus' condensation of the law and the proph- 
ets into the one word love, and James' picture 
of genuine religion as kindness and purity, occur 
to one at once. But these are not definitions. 
This absence of theorizing about religion in the 
very literature which has come to be the support 
and the authority of the religious life, is full of 
instruction for our hair-splitting Western race, 
which, in its eagerness to be logical, sometimes 
forgets to be good. It is precisely this habit of 
intellectual review and analysis which has brought 
us into the necessity of such a discussion as 
the present. Centuries of reflection and de- 
bate have produced a progeny of more or less 
definite and co-ordinate conceptions of religion, 
and now that science has come with a new mental 
brood, we have discovered, as we think, some dis- 
cord in the family of our ideas, and must set 
about quieting the theoretical trouble. 

In the effort to find the essential elements of 
religion, observation of the phenomenon as it 
actually occurs in the world of mankind is ob- 
viously our first duty. Of course, to be most use- 
ful the observation must be as wide as possible. 
The most rudimentary stages of the religious 



94 THE NEW PEACE 

development need to be represented, as well as 
the most advanced. But it is in regard to these 
backward or degenerate forms of religion that our 
information is scantiest and most contradictory. 
The observers upon whose reports we have to 
rely have met varying obstacles among the dif- 
ferent peoples studied and have themselves been 
variously equipped for their task. This will ex- 
plain the greater part of the divergence of their 
reports. The chief obstacle to getting at the 
heart of primitive religions is what seems to be 
a native and universal reserve which shields the 
inner life against vulgar intrusion. It has some- 
times been misinterpreted. The silence of the 
savage about his religious conceptions has been 
taken to mean that he had nothing to communicate, 
and the traveler returns to tell the world that such 
and such a tribe has no religious ideas and sen- 
timents. It requires a more or less prolonged 
intercourse and a thoroughly sympathetic bearing 
to call out of their hiding these intimate revela- 
tions. Accordingly, the missionary is as a rule 
the best observer. No one else has the motive 
which justifies the long and kindly association. 
And yet some missionaries, handicapped by a 
definition framed at home and incapable of respect 
for any so-called false religion, have been unable 
to give any reliable account of the religion which 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 95 

it was their business to displace. The attitude 
of Dr. Nassau is the true and hopeful one. 
When he went forty years ago to live among the 
savage negroes of West Africa, he did not think 
it reasonable, he tells us, to dismiss curtly as ab- 
surd the cherished sentiments of so large a por- 
tion of the human race. We are not surprised 
to find so rich a harvest of first-hand, trustworthy 
observations in his recent book on Fetichism. 

It need hardly be said that the origin of re- 
ligion is under the same veil of mystery which 
envelops all beginnings. When the stream of 
the individual consciousness took its rise, it blew 
no trumpet, it set up no stakes, it wrote no record; 
and no man knows the place of it. Even more 
secret and inaccessible are the sources of the 
tribal consciousness, what religious content they 
held in solution, and whence it was derived. 
Deeper still in the irrecoverable past lie the foun- 
tains of the racial consciousness. All that we can 
say of it is, that where it first emerges from the 
mist-wreathed mountains of its origin and comes 
plainly into view, it is already deeply tinged with 
religion. And yet, in spite of the impossibility 
of getting at the origin of religion to make ob- 
servations upon it, the question is so seductive 
that anthropologists seem to maintain their en- 
thusiasm in research mainly in the hope of being 



96 THE NEW PEACE 

able to throw back upon it some light from phe- 
nomena that are still accessible. The facts which 
they have observed suggest, of course, some hy- 
pothesis of origin, but the difficulty is that the hy- 
pothesis cannot be put to experimental test. Its 
highest justification is that it accords with all the 
known facts of the case and unifies them. It 
cannot take rank as a scientific law, in the sense 
in which we use that term; it is only a working 
hypothesis. 

One meets in current discussion several of 
these hypotheses of the origin of religion. There 
is the ultra-conservative theory of an original 
divine revelation transmitted to the branching 
races of men by tradition. There is the mystic's 
theory of a sixth sense, the sensus numinis, intui- 
tive and, like reason, native to every man. An- 
other theory supposes that the spiritual beings 
with whom religion is concerned were simply the 
projection of primitive man's own conscious 
powers upon the mists of the unknown. The 
theory, held by Herbert Spencer, Mr. Tylor, and 
most anthropologists, known as the " ghost 
theory," supposes that primitive speculation on 
sleep, trance, death, and the human shapes seen 
in dreams, led to the conception of a phantom or 
ghost-soul, separable from the body; hence, the 
world of spirits and ghosts, and God the greatest 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 97 

of the ghosts. 

With this brief allusion we must dismiss all 
these working hypotheses except the last. Permit 
me to remind you of the recent work of Mr. 
Andrew Lang, 1 which seriously compromises, if 
it does not entirely discredit, this hitherto ortho- 
dox scientific ghost-theory. He finds amidst the 
confusion of low savage faith a germ of pure, 
though inarticulate, religious belief, which in an 
earlier stage may have been even less overlaid 
with fable. For example, the lowest of all hu- 
man races, the Australian, has attained a religious 
conception far above what savages are usually 
credited with, and it is clear that he has not done 
so by way of the ghost-theory, for in the Aus- 
tralian's creed neither sacrifice nor ghost-worship 
has any place. Note this Bushman's confession to 
a friend: " Cagn made all things, and we pray to 
him, O Cagn, are we not your children? Do 
you not see our hunger? Give us food." 2 
In Africa, says Dr. Nassau, belief in one great 
Supreme Being is universal. He goes further 
and declares that during his long residence among 
the Western tribes he saw or heard of none, even 
among the most degraded, whose religious thought 

//'The Making of Religion," 1898; "Myth, Ritual and Re- 
ligion," 2 ed., 1899. 

2 Lang, "Myth, Ritual and Religion," II, 36. Cagn = the 
insect, mantis. Cf. Encyc. Brit., 11 ed., XIX, 135. 



98 THE NEW PEACE 

was only a superstition. 3 

It was upon the basis of such facts as these that 
Mr. Lang reconsidered his former view which 
coincided with Mr. Tylor's, and came to look upon 
a form of theism as the primitive expression of the 
religious consciousness, and furthermore to see 
that the religion of the lowest races, in its highest 
form, does in reality sanction morality. He con- 
fesses that, like others, he had thought savages 
incapable of such relatively pure ideas, but being 
unable to resist the evidence, he abandoned his a 
priori notions. His present position he sum- 
marizes in these words: " Not only the puzzling 
element of myth, but the purer element of religious 
belief sanctioning morality is derived by civilized 
people from a remote past of savagery." With 
this general conclusion agrees that eminent author- 
ity, the late Dr. Brinton, who goes, indeed, a step 
beyond the English writer. He feels no hesita- 
tion, for example, in saying that, while the very 
dawn of the religious consciousness is lost behind 
the impenetrable mists of the early Stone Age, its 
explanation is simple and universal. For man is 
man whenever and wherever you find him. As 
the Spy and Neanderthal skulls are distinctly 
human skulls, so the mode of mental action and 
the ground ideas of man are always the same, 

3 Nassau, " Fetichism in West Africa," 36, 38. 



WHAT IS RELIGION? 99 

whether one discovers him swinging into place 
the monoliths of Stonehenge or suspending in mid- 
air the dome of St. Peter's. We may not be 
justified in holding with a German ethnologist the 
extreme determinist view that the human mind 
is a machine which, supplied with " the same ma- 
terials, will infallibly grind out the same product " ; 
" we do not think, thinking merely goes on within 
us." But we cannot refuse to accept the mass of 
ethnological evidence now at hand pointing to the 
idenity of mental construction and action from the 
earliest and rudest type down to the latest and 
highest. " The same laws of growth which de- 
velop the physical man everywhere into the traits 
of the species act also on his psychical powers, and 
not less absolutely, to bring their products into 
conformity." This simple fact explains the strik- 
ing similarity in primitive religious ideas. We 
have no need to invoke either historic connection 
or tradition from a common ancestry. The mind 
of man reacting in practically the same way to the 
same stimuli will everywhere reach fundamentally 
identical conceptions. This is true of the realm 
of the arts and institutions no less than of religion. 
Now, what is the fundamental and therefore 
universal reaction of the human mind in the midst 
of the manifold forms and ordered activities of 
the natural world? It is, in Dr. Brinton's words, 



ioo THE NEW PEACE 

the recognition " that conscious volition is the 
ultimate source of all force. It is the belief that 
behind the sensuous, phenomenal world, distinct 
from it, giving it form, existence, and activity, lies 
the ultimate, invisible, immeasurable power of 
mind, of conscious Will, of Intelligence, analogous 
in some way to our own ; and, — mark this essential 
corollary, that man is in communication with it" 4 
This recognition or assumption is at the founda- 
tion of all the spontaneous or primitive religions, 
and, with the curious exception of Buddhism which 
is less a religion that an ethical philosophy, like- 
wise of the founded or salvation religions. From 
this point of view the significance of Jesus lies in 
the personal revelation which he made of the 
abstract universal Intelligence as being in sympa- 
thetic neighborhood to human need, and in his 
clearing the way for freer commerce with the un- 
seen. As Paul expressed it, " God was in Christ 
reconciling the world unto Himself." Jesus' com- 
panions and interpreters felt that they had heard, 
had seen with their eyes, and had handled with 
their hands somewhat of the eternal Life, and that 
through Him they had a freshened fellowship with 
the Father. 5 

4 Brinton, "Religions of Primitive Peoples," 47. 
5 I Jno., 1 11-3. 



CRISIS 101 

The Religious Crisis 

This general survey of the religous phenomenon 
brings into view its universal elements, — what 
may be called the religious element proper and the 
mythical element. The distinctively religious ele- 
ment is that which recognizes and opens corre- 
spondence with the unseen Powers. The mythical 
element taking objective expression in ritual is the 
product of the religious. It speculates about the 
world of the Powers, and is invariably responsible 
for the religious crisis. Its elaboration of animis- 
tic ideas and beliefs sometimes overflows the purer 
germ of religion and supersedes it. For there 
seems to be little check upon this primitive fancy 
and speculation. In West Africa, for example, 
where " any system of atheism strikes the people 
as too absurd for denial," God is supposed to have 
withdrawn from the world after creating it and to 
have allowed it to fall under the control of evil 
spirits. It is only to these evil spirits, accordingly, 
that worship is paid. The people say, " God is far 
from us. He does not help or harm us. Why 
should we care for him? " 6 Here the mythical 
factor is supreme in the religious life, and its 
speculations cannot escape the criticism of a higher 
culture so soon as it arises. 

6 Nassau, " Fetichism in West Africa," 38, 39. 



102 THE NEW PEACE 

The case of the religion of the ancient Greeks 
is a more instructive example, because in it the de- 
velopment went forward to a further phase, which 
is analogous to the current situation of Christian- 
ity. The brooding of the poetic imagination upon 
the central conceptions of religion generated in 
the course of time the intricate mythology of the 
heroes and Olympian divinities. It is these very 
personal and vital men and women, gods and 
goddesses, of whom we read in Homer. The poet 
does not discuss abstractions and general prin- 
ciples, nor define the relation of the divine world 
to the human. He writes the glowing history of 
very real personages in the midst of whose struggle 
on the plain flash to and fro the no less real 
Athene and Ares and Aphrodite for guidance or 
for succor. The pale cast of thought, we may be 
thankful, came later. But it came. With the rise 
of abstract reflection the poet and his beautiful 
creations had to face the critic. It was inevitable. 
For the essential content of the religious con- 
sciousness is always at war with the particular and 
limited form in which it happens to find expres- 
sion. Criticism, at first in alliance with this es- 
sence, exposes the unreality of the form, under- 
mines the mythology, objecting that it lowers the 
spiritual to the level of the natural; and then, upon 
the destruction of the form, it begins to question 



CRISIS 103 

the existence of the spiritual essence itself. 
" Superstition bowing down before an idol, just 
as an idol, provokes the unbelief which refuses 
to worship even the god. And rationalism which 
begins by pointing out that the myth is not true as 
the expression of a simple fact, ends in the denial 
that there can ever be anything more than a simple 
fact to express. " 7 

The critical era for Greece came with the clos- 
ing years of the fifth century B.C. A new national 
experience combined with the rise of abstract 
thought to produce the widespread skepticism of 
the Sophistic movement, which involved not merely 
religious beliefs but all knowledge " in one gen- 
eral web of distrust." The Sophists after laying 
bare the emptiness of the popular faith, coldly 
turned their backs on all religion and gave atten- 
tion solely to preparing their pupils for achiev- 
ing a successful practical career. 

The modern counterpart of this development is 
the rise and dominance of the mediaeval theology 
and the critical movement of the eighteenth cen- 
tury known as the Enlightenment, continued in the 
nineteenth century as Positivism or the disillusion- 
ment of science. One of the most striking facts in 
the history of Christianity is the increasing ob- 
scuration of its inner life and essence down to a re- 

7 Caird, " Evolution of Religion," I, 298. 



io 4 THE NEW PEACE 

cent period. According to Jesus, religion, i. e. His 
religion, is love to God and man. According to 
His brother and apostolic interpreter, it is purity 
and kindness. According to the most gifted and 
influential of His successors, Christ Himself, in 
His own person, is all and in all. In other words, 
the essence of Christianity is an inward disposition, 
not an external connection. It is a personal at- 
tachment, not subscription to intellectual proposi- 
tions. It is a close and easy correspondence with 
the Father through Christ, who came out from 
Him to dwell among us and returned to Him bear- 
ing our confidence and love, " the grandeur God " 
becoming for us " the comfort Christ." But the 
historic development has been away from this 
fundamental conception. The mythical factor 
came early into play, and inasmuch as men had 
long before found their way into the world of 
abstractions, this mythical factor, which in a rude 
or poetic people had elaborated ancestor-worship, 
or fetichism, or a rich mythology, now exercised 
itself mainly in the creation of a complex ritual 
and a co-ordinated body of doctrine. Indeed, 
a distinguished European ethnologist declares that 
even fetichism is by no means unknown to-day to 
Catholic Christianity and its cult. The church, 
Western and Eastern, builds about itself a high 
thorny hedge of so-called articles of faith chosen 



CRISIS 105 

after hot debates in councils and synods, and 
then with a serene authority declares that there 
is no salvation for those on the outside. Tol- 
stoy's faith in the church was chiefly shattered, 
so he says, by its indifference to what was essential 
in Jesus' teachings and its avidity for what was of 
secondary importance. Is the lapse from the con- 
ception of Jesus less real in Protestant Christian- 
ity? From being a renewed life, has it not been 
largely transformed into the acceptance of a body 
of religious beliefs? What but this can be the 
meaning of the perplexity of an American theolo- 
gian held in the highest regard by us all? " When 
I think," said he a few months ago, " how little 
Peter and James and John, on the banks of the 
Jordan at the beginning of Christ's ministry, knew 
about Christian doctrine, I am amazed that they 
should have been counted among His disciples. If 
you had asked them about the deity of Christ, or 
about the atonement, they would not have under- 
stood the meaning of your words." He is able 
to resolve the incongruity only by suggesting with 
an interesting and artless candor that " all Christ- 
ian doctrine was latent in their obedience." 8 And 
is not our militant denominationalism another ex- 
pression of the same lapse? Tests which are 
purely intellectual are applied at the entrance of 

8 Strong, " Our Denominational Outlook," 1904, pp. 21, 22. 



106 THE NEW PEACE 

very many Christian communions, and the discredit 
of erroneous opinions sometimes extends beyond 
the ecclesiastical close to bar admission to other 
associative groupings. Mr. Justin McCarthy re- 
calls the fact that about 1872 one of the most in- 
fluential of the London journals sneered at the 
Parliamentary candidature of Professor Fawcett, 
on the ground that he was a man who, as a believer 
in the Darwinian theory, admitted that his great 
grandfather was a frog. One must think " right " 
at the peril of one's salvation both in this life and 
that which is to come. If one think " right," the 
Powers will relax somewhat the demand for good- 
ness. Such a requisition would not seem to be 
particularly severe upon so superlative rational 
powers as Augustine had, or Calvin, or St. 
Thomas, or John Stuart Mill. But what would be- 
come of us ordinary mortals, who can hardly be 
brought to think at all? In the Journal of 
Eugenie de Guerin we read of the arrest and 
condemnation to burning of a poor shepherdess 
who carried off in her apron the blessed sacrament 
from an empty church and placed it under a rose- 
tree in the wood. When about to die she con- 
fessed to a priest that she only wanted to have the 
blessed sacrament in the forest. " I thought," 
she said, " the good God would be as satisfied un- 
der a rose-tree as on an altar." But she was 



- CRISIS 107 

burnt. And of what account was the consecra- 
tion of the simple-hearted colored preacher whom 
I knew, if along with it he had not been " sound " 
in doctrine? In terms not altogether pleasing to 
an over-refined taste, he said one day: "I jes' 
feel like I must go to Africky as a missionary. 
An' ef them men-eaters gits me, it'll be all right. 
Eben out'n ole George's hash thar'll rise up a 
sweet savor unto de Lord dat'll glorify his blessed 
name." 

Let me give you in some detail for its illustra- 
tive value the twelfth-century French legend of 
" Our Lady's Tumbler." It is the story of a 
travelling minstrel who grew weary of the world 
and entered the monastery in Clairvaux. He had 
spent his life in tumbling, leaping, and dancing, 
and knew nothing else, — no paternoster, no chant, 
no credo, no ave, nor, in the language of the 
legend, " aught that might make for his salva- 
tion." He was abashed among the priests, dea- 
cons, sub-deacons, and acolytes, who all had tasks 
in season, while he was able to do nothing suitable 
to so holy a place. In his grief he came one day 
upon a crypt in the monastery where was an altar 
and above it the form of the Holy Mary. The 
signal for the Mass sounded, and he was dis- 
mayed. "Ah!" he cried; "now each will say 
his stave, and here am I like a tethered ox, doing 



108 THE NEW PEACE 

naught but browse. — Shall I say it? Shall I do 
it ? By the Mother of God, I will ! I shall ne'er 
be blamed for it, if I do what I have learned, and 
serve the Mother of God in her monastery accord- 
ing to my trade. The rest serve in chanting, and 
I will serve in tumbling." Laying off his cloak, 
he takes his stand right humbly before the image. 
u Lady," says he, " to your protection I com- 
mend my body and my soul. Sweet queen, sweet 
lady, despise not what I know. I can nor chant 
nor read to you ; but, certes, I would pick for you a 
choice of all my finest feats." Then he began 
his leaping and tumbling and dancing, at intervals 
throwing himself on his knees before the image 
to salute and adore it. He arose and in festal 
guise made the vault of Metz around his head, and 
turned and saluted the image. Then he did the 
French vault, and the vault of Lorraine, and then 
the Roman vault, and with his hand before his 
brow he danced most featly as he gazed humbly at 
the image. " Lady," he said, " this is a choice 
performance. I do it for no other but for you and 
your son. And it is no play work. But I am 
serving you for your disport, and that pays me. 
Lady, despise not your slave." When he heard 
them raise the chants, he laid to in right good earn- 
est, and as long as the Mass lasted he ceased not 
until he dropped upon the ground for weariness. 



CRISIS 109 

" Lady," he said, " I can do no more now; but, in- 
deed, I will come again. Adieu, sweetest friend. 
What pity that I know not all those psalters! 
Right gladly would I say them for love of you." 
This life the good man led long time in secret. 
At last the Abbot witnessed one day all the min- 
strel's office, and when it closed he saw a glorious 
Dame descend from the vault with angels to sus- 
tain and solace her exhausted servant. The 
mediaeval writer, with the simplicity and true re- 
ligious instinct which shine all the brighter for the 
elaborate formalism and official theologies of the 
time, thus points the moral of the story: " God 
rejects no one who comes to him in love, of what- 
ever trade he be, if only he love God and do 
right." 

Thus the simple devout. But the great leaders 
— what of them? No clearness of spiritual 
vision, no shining of the face of prayer, no depth 
of the hunger for righteousness, no mounting up 
of the passion for perfection, no brightness and 
purity of life recovering the stained and the stum- 
bling, no strength of hand for blessed ministries, 
can set at rights, or make amends for, a slip in doc- 
trine. My Lady Macbeth, Theology, or, if you 
prefer, Ecclesiasticism, finds it hard to wash out 
the stain of blood shed for opinion's sake, and all 
Araby's spices cannot sweeten that hand again. 



no THE NEW PEACE 

And the horrible business of religious persecution 
is not finished yet. I greatly fear that not all the 
Johannes Agricolas have yet " laid their spirits 
down at last in God's breast," but some remain 
with us who, at the demand of the dogma, com- 
placently might — 

Gaze below on hell's fierce bed, 

And those its waves of flame oppress. 

Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white 

With prayer, the broken-hearted nun, 

The martyr, the wan acolyte, 

The incense-swinging child, — undone 

Before God fashioned star or sun ! 

God, whom I praise; how could I praise, 

If such as I might understand? 

We have seen that the mythical factor co-exists 
with the religious factor in the rudest as well as 
in the most advanced religions. It finds expres- 
sion now in an exuberant animism or mythology, 
now in ritual, now in dogma. In the case of 
Christianity, its Hebrew ancestry imposed some 
checks upon the universal tendency to speculate 
about the content of the religious consciousness. 
Accordingly, in its earliest forms the moral and 
spiritual elements allowed little place for the re- 
flective. As late, indeed, as the close of the sec- 
ond century Celsus, the first pagan critic of the 
new religion, repeats as a reproach practically the 
same thing which Paul had counted a distinction 



CRISIS in 

of the Gospel, — " not many wise men after the 
flesh are called." But when once Christianity, 
spreading beyond Hebraism, came into living con- 
tact with the Hellenic culture, the obstruction of 
racial inaptitude and the restraint of Jesus' own 
teaching were no longer operative, and, as Pro- 
fessor Edwin Hatch declared, within a century and 
a half after this first contact, the ideas and 
methods of philosophy flowed in such mass into 
Christianity as to make it no less a philosophy than 
a religion. 9 It is not unlikely that the speculating 
tendency received additional stimulus as well as 
materials from the Pauline letters, which for the 
most part arose out of the necessity which was 
upon him to vindicate his Gospel by dialectical 
methods before the bar of Jewish learning. A 
transient necessity was misinterpreted as establish- 
ing an authoritative precedent and fixing the em- 
phasis where it does not belong. 

Now, the historic eclipse of the vital, personal, 
practical idea of Jesus, this shifting of the empha- 
sis of the Christian experience from life to opinion, 
led directly to the superstitions, the formal creeds, 
the extravagancies, and tyrannies which precipi- 
tated the eighteenth century crisis of the Enlight- 
enment and the nineteenth century crisis of the 

9 Hatch, " Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the 
Christian Church," 125. 



ii2 THE NEW PEACE 

scientific criticism. Only the latter concerns us 
here. It was inevitable. For the elaboration of 
opinion under religious sanction ranged over well- 
nigh the whole world of fact. It involved cos- 
mogony, ethnology, and history. It had its theory 
of the earth and of the heavens, of disease, of 
language, of education. But all those matters 
were manifestly within the scope of science and 
subject to its revision. 

The first contact of the new natural knowledge 
with the body of religious opinions was in many 
serious minds disastrous. The great scientific 
generalizations mentioned in the first lecture at 
fundamental points antagonized squarely the 
world-view which had grown up under the sanction 
and protection of Christianity. They date this 
side of 1830. The next decade is the precise 
period when the ghost of doubt begins to haunt 
the heights of English culture. Here begins what 
has been called the modern tragedy of opinion. 
It is just then that Carlyle cries out bitterly, 
" Nothing, or almost nothing is certain to me ! " 
Froude says that he and a band of companion 
truth-seekers were driven to the wilderness in 
search of some certainty on which they might rest. 
Tennyson, in his poetic seclusion, had moments 
of dark misgiving, when he could only " stretch 
lame hands to God," and " trust that somehow 



CRISIS 113 

Good will be the final goal of 111." Francis New- 
man and George Eliot in these same revolutionary 
years bade adieu to their ardent evangelicanism. 
Matthew Arnold's early poems, tinged with the 
sad beauty of a pagan despair, bear testimony to 
the stress of the time, when, as he complains, 

The old is out of date; 
The new is not yet born, 

And Arthur Clough's devout fine spirit returned 
no more to port from drifting on the ocean of 
doubt. 10 

If the religious life itself did not suffer asphyxia 
in these and other gifted minds, religious beliefs 
underwent serious disintegration, and in some of 
them were swept entirely away. A storm was on 
the high seas, and many a fair sail that ventured 
into it split and sunk, and many that lived through 
it bore ever afterwards the marks of its distress. 
But it could not have been otherwise. Is not the 
way of light always a narrow way beset with 
fatal perils? An ocean without storms is an 
ocean without life, and some craft must go down 
if any are to sail. Human nature is so constituted 
that it must struggle into its larger hopes, and it is 
an inevitable incident that some perish in the 
transition. The pain and peril of such a time are 

10 Cf. Tullock, "Movements of Religious Thought in 
Britain," Ch. VII. 



ii 4 THE NEW PEACE 

none the less real when they are scientifically ex- 
plained; but they become less terrifying. We 
now recognize them as growing pains, as due to 
the less successful efforts of the religious con- 
sciousness to adjust itself to a new situation. 
New, i. e., to the existing religious consciousness. 
As we have heretofore noted, in the historical 
development of religion such a crisis is not new. 
" It hath been already in the ages which were 
before us." The external situation which precipi- 
tates the crisis is all that varies from age to age. 
And even these situations, as we have seen, have 
the common character of a widened experience, 
which wakes up the critical faculty to review the 
creations of fancy and speculation grown up in 
the interval of its dormancy. 

Of course, from the view-point of those who 
speak authoritatively for religion, the critic is the 
heretic or the infidel, according to the extent of his 
negations. And every religion which has reached 
the stage of criticism, and every time such a stage 
is repeated, can show examples of this interesting 
person. Sometimes, like the prophet of the 
ancient Hebrew religion, he is gifted with origi- 
nality and insight, and shatters the forms of wor- 
ship to save the heart of it. Sometimes, like 
Socrates in the Greek crisis, your infidel repudiates 
a poetical mythology and introduces the spiritual 



HERETIC 115 

conception of the Divine Being in the market- 
place, endangering the traditional rites on which 
the fortunes of the State depend. Or, like 
Lucretius in the Roman crisis and Haeckel in the 
nineteenth century crisis, in the name of science he 
rejects all religion along with a particular expres- 
sion of religion which he has identified with its es- 
sence. And now it is Marcion of the second cen- 
tury, a man of deep religious character, who re- 
volts from the mixture in current Christianity of 
eclectic paganism and Gnostic speculation, and 
makes the first rupture of the dogmatic unity of the 
church on the issue of the return to the simplicity 
of the original Gospel. Or it is that apostle of the 
eighteenth century Enlightenment, Voltaire, that 
incarnated smile, who, disgusted and indignant at 
the bigotry and injustice of organized Christianity, 
upon the monstrous death of the poor Huguenot 
by priestly authority, raised in behalf of outraged 
humanity a defiant shout which well-nigh shook to 
its ruin every religious establishment in Europe. 
He built a church on his estate and, in impatience 
at the endless list of saints to whom most churches 
were dedicated, he, in his own person, dedicated 
this simply to God; we read of his communing 
in it later. And when the Lisbon earthquake shat- 
tered not only houses, but over a wider area the 
faith of many, who but this smiling infidel uttered 



n6 THE NEW PEACE 

the call to faith in an inscrutable Providence in 
view of that catastrophe? And yet the uncritical 
tradition of Roman Catholic abuse spreads be- 
yond that communion and comes down to our own 
day. And I should like to speak of the pugna- 
cious Professor Huxley of the keen rapier, who 
more than once made life uncomfortable for Eng- 
lish bishops — Professor Huxley working in his 
old age on a Bible story-book for children, and 
possessing, according to an extravagant friend, 11 
enough real Christianity to save every man, 
woman, and child in the British Isles, with plenty 
to spare. 

But I wish to speak more particularly of two 
other cases, and from the point of view of their 
own inward experience. The first is the deeply 
instructive experience of one of the most eminent 
of contemporary biologists and psychologists. 
The late Professor Romanes made years ago a 
severely rational and candid examination of 
theism, and reached sadly a wholly negative re- 
sult. And yet with his own unanswered argu- 
ments before him, his deeper nature rebelled 
against the deliverance of his reason, and still cried 
out after God, reminding us of what Dr. Johnson 
once said about the appearance of a man's spirit 
after his death, " All argument is against it, but 

11 Cf. The Atlantic Monthly, Feb., 1901, p. 283. 



HERETIC 117 

all belief is for it." There were times when 
Romanes' habitual repression of these deeper long- 
ings relaxed and he poured his heart out in the 
tenderest of poetic appeals. Read his sonnet be- 
ginning " I ask not for thy love, O Lord," and 
closing with these words : 

I ask not for Thy love; nor e'en so much 
As for a hope on Thy dear breast to lie; 

But be Thou still my shepherd — still with such 
Compassion as may melt to such a cry; 

That so I hear Thy feet, and feel Thy touch, 
And dimly see Thy face, ere yet I die. 

He meditated deeply on this antithesis in his own 
nature. He lived to resolve it. Only two months 
before his death he wrote to a friend, — what 
seems to have goaded Haeckel into an unworthy 
effort to discredit the validity of the experience, 
— that he was beginning to see the truth that logi- 
cal processes are not the only means of knowledge 
in transcendental regions. In his remarkable 
posthumous notes on religion, he declares that 
reason is not the only attribute of man nor the 
only faculty for the ascertainment of truth; that 
the moral and spiritual faculties are of no less im- 
portance. In the rational sphere he was critical 
and agnostic; in the sphere of essential religion 
he was devout and responsive. With the vivid 
recognition of the necessity of faith and of the 



n8 THE NEW PEACE 

legitimacy and value of its intuitions, he died in 
full and deliberate communion with the church of 
Jesus Christ. 

Consider now the experience of a Biblical critic 
of the first rank, the historian of the origins of 
Christianity. In that remote and wild district of 
northwest France, Brittany, there is a popular 
legend of an imaginary town called Is which was 
swallowed up by the sea long ago. The fisher- 
men say that the tops of its church spires can be 
seen in the hollows of the waves when the sea is 
rough, and in calm weather the music of its church 
bells may be heard above the waters. The famous 
critic Renan, whose youth was spent in this 
region, says: " I often fancy that I have at the 
bottom of my heart a city of Is with its bells call- 
ing to prayer a recalcitrant congregation." 12 
Who will say that this brilliant man's relation to 
Christianity would not have been the reverse of 
what it was, if the Christianity of Brittany had 
found the expression suited to the time? Was it 
not the outworn and lifeless form of it which, 
though it aroused no questionings in the simple 
life of Brittany, was found to be incompatible with 
the fuller light of his Paris experience? And 
was not the confounding of essence with form, of 
faith with intellectual assent to dogma, responsi- 

12 Renan, " Recollections of My Youth," Preface. 



HERETIC 119 

ble for the tension and pain of his first misgivings? 
On the one hand, he declares that Christianity 
is dead and nothing can be done for it until it is 
transformed. 13 On the other hand, he writes 
again to his friend the great chemist, writes from 
Rome, whose tranquillity and supernatural fascina- 
tion had so completely changed him that he was no 
longer French and no longer the critic. " You 
know," says he, " that religious impressions are 
very potent with me and that as a result of my 
education they mingle in an undefinable propor- 
tion with the most mysterious instincts of my 
nature. These impressions have awakened here 
with an energy that I cannot describe to you." 14 
When he says in the " Recollections," " I feel that 
in reality my existence is governed by a faith which 
I no longer possess," does he not really bear un- 
conscious witness to the persistence of faith in 
spite of the vanishing of many beliefs? Dogmas 
fall into discredit before his critical faculty; but 
does he not retain his early sense of God and the 
eternal things? And those bells of Is ringing 
even in his last years in the depths of his being, — 
what are they but the echoes of the spiritual sphere 
still caught by the ear of a living faith through 
the clamors of the skeptical reason? the bond of 

13 " Letters from the Holy Land," 8. 

14 Id., 34. 



120 THE NEW PEACE 

the unseen world, strained perhaps but still un- 
broken? I do not undertake to say how far one 
may go in the denial of intellectual propositions 
on religious subjects without losing the vision of 
God, which is the essence of faith. 

Indeed, such a question is beside the present 
purpose. I advance no apologetic in behalf of 
these great names. They all, Hebrew, pagan, 
Christian, interest us in this connection only be- 
cause they show how, in all religions alike, the 
advent of criticism precipitates the irrepressible 
conflict over the varied forms in which the reli- 
gious principle expresses itself in life, and because 
they illustrate the different issues of that conflict 
in personal experience. 

But the crisis passes. Out of the shadows the 
religious life emerges unruffled, deep; for it was 
only the outworks and appurtenances of religion 
that were involved in the struggle. Some of these 
it is better to surrender. When this distinction is 
recognized the tension has already begun to relax. 
As regards our own crisis, we may grant that the 
Gospel in its origin was connected with a view of 
the world which the progress of science makes 
impossible for us. The Gospel itself does not 
thereby become impossible for us. As says Har- 
nack, its essential elements are timeless, and the 
man to whom it addresses itself is also timeless 



TRIUMPH 121 

in the sense that no progress which he makes 
ever changes his inmost constitution or his funda- 
mental relations. " Since that is so, this Gospel 
remains in force, then, for us too." In its pass- 
age into the wider horizons of modern science, 
painful though it has been, the Gospel has given 
the latest demonstration of its inherent vital- 
ity and its permanent validity. It would be profit- 
less to make an inventory of losses in the sphere 
of its accessories. It is too soon to be very sure 
what they are in all cases. What we need to ob- 
serve is, rather, that Christianity has already 
dropped the antiquated view of the world and of 
history, and has found its place in the new world of 
science. The fact is attested by the highest science 
as well as by the latest Christian theologies. It 
is reflected in the poetry of the time. The minor 
Victorian poets are, indeed, smitten with the sense 
of disillusion. That " sea of faith once at the 
full," they 

Only hear 
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. 

Before the central mysteries of life and death, the 
poets of doubt, as Arnold and Clough, bemoan 
the failure of their quest and the retreat of the 
spiritual vision before the advance of science. 
The poets of art, as Swinburne and Rossetti, 
either deny the spiritual vision, or use its asso- 



wmm 



122 THE NEW PEACE 

ciated sentiments for purely aesthetic purposes. 
These schools, however, only mark painful stages 
in the adaptive development of English poetry. 
Tennyson and Browning, the master-singers, carry 
forward that development to a higher point. 
They reflect the conflict of the period, but do not 
rest in it. Tennyson " marks the final stage of 
agnosticism feeling its way towards faith." And 
faith comes at last; peace follows the exhausting- 
struggle ; and, as he crosses the bar in the evening 
time, he is singing of meeting his Pilot face to face. 
In Browning the transition is completed. In him 
the hard-won calm assurance of Tennyson swells 
to the note of triumph, and when he passed out, he 
left this last word, — a personal record, it is true, 
but also the goal and crown of the Victorian quest 
of faith in the new world of science : 

One who never turned his back, but marched breast forward, 

Never doubted clouds would break, 
Never dreamed tho' right were worsted, wrong would triumph, 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 

Sleep to wake. 

Science in Religion 

I have given, as you see, a natural history ac- 
count of religion, of its origin, elements, and de- 
velopment to its latest phase. Let us be on our 
guard against the subtle spread in our minds of the 



SCIENCE IN RELIGION 123 

feeling that such an account of religion empties 
it of divine content. For the discovery of a close- 
set evolutionary sequence sets aside neither the in- 
telligent originating energy, nor the intelligent sus- 
taining and guiding energy, which such a sequence 
presupposes. If God could enter the orderly suc- 
cession of natural events only in a cloud, and stand 
to do His work only in places where we can put 
nothing else, we might question His having any- 
thing to do with a history which can be described 
from beginning to end in terms of cause and effect. 
But when we understand, as we do now, that He 
is already within all natural processes, that any 
sequence is a sequence because it is the expression 
of the unity of His purpose, then an evolutionary 
history such as we have sketched is seen to be 
alive with His presence from first to last. If we 
say that religion is psychological in origin, it is 
the same as if we say that God so made the human 
mind and so stationed it in the midst of relations 
that the thought of Him was natural to it. And 
if we say that man, in the course of his slow de- 
velopment out of savagery, has had such and such 
experiences with the thought of God, all that we 
mean is that man's enlarging capacity and widen- 
ing outlook supplied the opportunity of a divine 
revelation of increasing clearness and fullness. 
God's education of man in the things of the eternal 



i2 4 THE NEW PEACE 

world loses nothing of reality by suiting itself to 
the natural situation of the pupil and adopting the 
method which the divine operation takes every- 
where else. Nor is such an education through 
natural evolutional processes one whit less effi- 
cient than would have been a neatly graded series 
of religious text-books prepared in the skies and 
at the right intervals handed out to chosen teach- 
ers amidst fitting solemnities on the summits of 
sacred mountains. 

For religion is a natural phenomenon; so 
natural and normal to the human constitution that, 
even from the biological point of view, it may be 
said to be diagnostic of man as compared with 
other organisms. It is of universal occurrence 
in the human species. Ethnology knows of tribes 
which cannot count beyond three, or five, or six, 
and which have neither dwelling nor trace of cloth- 
ing, but it knows of none which is devoid of 
religion. The leading assertions to the contrary 
were made years ago by Herbert Spencer and Sir 
John Lubbock (now Lord Aveling), but Brinton, 
the chief authority on North American linguistics 
and religion, dismisses these assertions by saying 
curtly that neither one of the gentlemen ever saw 
a savage tribe. Religion is a more distinctive 
feature of man's nature than art, or music, or 
language, and the historic development of this 



SCIENCE IN RELIGION 125 

feature takes the same place and observes the 
same laws that anthropology recognizes in the case 
of every other fundamental human activity. Nor 
does religion in its highest phase — the religion 
of Jesus, even with its unique additions — fall 
out of this deep harmony with God's method in 
other sections of nature. 

Furthermore, the religious consciousness itself, 
the moral and spiritual faculties, of which for con- 
venience we may be still permitted to speak as 
distinct from other faculties, are themselves the 
highest product of evolution; they arise out of the 
bosom of universal nature. And they are still at 
home there. For religion, with which they have 
to do, is, like the conclusions of science, capable of 
a species of verification upon that understanding. 
The verification is both observational and experi- 
mental. There is the general observation that the 
evolutionary process culminates in a moral being 
whose further historical development in all other 
respects goes forward pari passu with this develop- 
ing moral nature. Then, in the case of individu- 
als, it is observed what strength the religious 
element brings into the personality, the capacity 
for achievement rising in proportion to the vivid- 
ness of the religious consciousness. The practical 
mystic is invincible. Think of Paul, of Luther, of 
Cromwell, and the long line of the dreamers 



126 THE NEW PEACE 

" whose mastery over the temporal comes from 
their passionate devotion to the eternal." As re- 
gards the experimental verification, Ruskin sug- 
gests that the only inquiry into the grounds of the 
Christian religion that is possible to simple and 
busy men,- — and he intimates that it will be satis- 
factory, — is the practical trial for one year of the 
Sermon on the Mount in a genuine obedience of 
its teaching. Besides this sort of test another is 
available. In the case of human beings nature, 
by means of accident, or heredity, or disease, some- 
times presents us with conditions which we are 
forbidden to produce. Nature thus occasionally 
produces a man who is incapable of apprehending 
the moral order and of responding to its demand. 
Such a man is observed to be abnormal in other 
respects and is foredoomed to defeat in life. 

It appears, accordingly, that there is science in 
religion. Religion is grounded not only in the 
nature of man, but also in universal nature; and 
its rise and history, its elements and varied expres- 
sions in cult and creed are capable of being re- 
duced to the orderly coherence and precision of 
science. It will not matter whether you call such 
a study and body of truth anthropology, or 
theology, or simply the science of religion. Only 
let me remind you that it is not religion, and can 
be no substitute for it in personal experience. 



SCIENCE IN RELIGION 127 

The sense of order and unity in all the depart- 
ments of one's intellectual housekeeping may co- 
exist with dyspepsia and inanition of the house- 
keeper. The feeling of stability and rationalness 
is good for all our conceptions, including the reli- 
gious, but it will not feed the soul. A writer tells 
us that on the coast of England at a certain point 
young gulls are fed for the market on curds and 
gravel, the former fattening them, the latter im- 
proving their digestion. They had besides, he 
adds, only a raw gust of the sea. The science of 
religion would resemble this regimen with the 
curds left out. It will meet an intellectual, but 
not a religious need. It has no ease for the 
burden of sin, no satisfaction for the longing after 
purity; it provides no fellowship for the orphaned 
spirit; opens no shelter and fountains of refresh- 
ment in the waste places of life. 



LECTURE IV 
RELIGION IN SCIENCE 



The invisible things of him since the creation of 
the world are clearly seen, being perceived through 
the things that are made, even his everlasting 
power and divinity. 

— Paul, Letter to the Romans. 

It is true that a little Philosophy inclineth Mens 
Mindes to " A theism e " ; But depth in Philosophy 
bringeth Mens Mindes about to "Religion: " 
For while the Minde of Man looketh upon Second 
Causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, 
and goe no further: But when it beholdeth the 
chaine of them, Confederate and Linked together, 
it must needs flie to " Providence " and " Deitie." 
— Bacon, Essays, "Of Atheisme. }} 



RELIGION IN SCIENCE 

PROFESSOR HUXLEY, on the occasion of 
his receiving a public distinction, told a story 
of a member of the Society of Friends in the old 
pirate days. The lover of peace was a passenger 
on a ship which was threatened by a pirate ship. 
When the captain handed him a pike that he 
might take part in the common defense, he de- 
clined, though he was not unwilling to stand at the 
gangway and wait with the pike in his hand. 
When the pirates actually began to come on board, 
he pushed the sharp end of his pike into them, with 
the benevolent advice to each one, " Stay on thine 
own ship, friend." 

In view of our last discussion and of that which 
is now proposed, the question may be asked, Are 
we not inviting trouble by mixing up the crews 
of two distinct and hostile ships? Does not rea- 
son say to faith, with the pike at her breast, " Stay 
on thine own ship, friend " ? And is not faith 
equally concerned that reason stay on board its 
own ship? This question of distinct spheres has 
been heretofore touched upon incidentally. We 
must now consider it more directly. 

As was remarked before, the view is widely 
131 



132 THE NEW PEACE 

held. Dr. Osier, for example, told the medical 
students of Toronto University some eighteen 
months ago that they would all sooner or later 
come to the point where they would try " to mix 
the waters of science with the oil of faith." He 
said they could have a great deal of both, if they 
could only keep them separate; that the worry 
came from the attempt at mixture. 1 Dr. Brinton 
declares that religion and science arise in totally 
different tracts of the human mind, science from 
the conscious, religion from the sub- or uncon- 
scious intelligence, and that, therefore, there is no 
common measure between them. 2 We have 
noted, in the personal experience of a biologist 
and of a critic of our time, how these two powers 
of the mind presented themselves concretely in 
irreconcilable opposition, with different practical 
results. In the one case, a modus vivendi was es- 
tablished; in the other, faith with some protest, 
surrendered itself to the mastery of the rational 
faculty. The same antithesis appears in Tenny- 
son: 

If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, 
I heard a voice " believe no more," 
And heard an ever breaking shore 

That tumbled in the Godless deep; 

1 Johns Hopkins Univ. Circulars, Jan., 1904. 

2 " Relig. of Prim. Peoples," 331. 



SPHERES 133 

A warmth within the breast would melt 

The freezing reason's colder part, 

And like a man in wrath the heart 
Stood up and answered, " I have felt ! " 

No, like a child in doubt and fear: 
But that blind clamor made me wise; 
Then was I as a child that cries, 

But, crying, knows his father near. 

This blind clamor of heart and head has served 
the useful purpose of bringing into clear relief the 
distinction between faith and belief, a distinction 
of great practical importance. Faith is seen to 
be of the essence of religion, belief concerns the 
form of it. Faith is the spirit's attitude of re- 
sponse to the unseen world, belief is the mind's 
assent to propositions about it. Faith, whose 
stages and processes escape logical manipulation, 
is said to be the gift of God; belief is a state of 
mind reached automatically in the presence of a 
body of evidence, and cannot, therefore, be en- 
joined as a duty. Consequently, faith does not 
have to wait for the settlement of the mind's 
perplexities, and the odium and the distress of re- 
ligious doubt are not permitted to shadow the 
clearness of the heart's response to the divine ap- 
peal, which is the real test of the religious experi- 
ence. 

And yet, widespread and useful as the separa- 



i 3 4 THE NEW PEACE 

tion of the faith function and the rational function 
has been, I beg to remind you that faith and rea- 
son are powers of the same mind. Their strife 
is a civil strife. I am told that the old " faculty 
psychology," which treated mind as a sort of 
parliament of powers under the presidency of the 
will, is completely superseded. The mind is a 
unit and acts as a unit, when it acts at all. More- 
over, reason is no more characteristic of mind than 
is will, which includes impulse, desire, and in- 
stinct, and is close akin to the operation which we 
name faith. Indeed, will is held by some psy- 
chologists to be the more characteristic action, 
intellect being the expression of will. If, now, we 
have learned thoroughly the lesson which Horace 
Bushnell taught nearly fifty years ago, and have 
ceased to set over against each other the natural 
and the supernatural as mutually exclusive; if we 
extend the natural to embrace the supernatural 
and enthrone God over all, so that as Dante has 
it, " that Emperor who reigns above rules in all 
parts," then the realm of nature becomes one to 
its farthest confines, and the same mental powers 
bring us into relation with all its provinces. The 
apprehending faculty we call reason when it works 
under the relations of time and space or elaborates 
the sense-given ideas of the material world. We 
call it faith when it deals with the timeless and 



SPHERES 135 

spaceless world, where the thought symbols that 
epitomize time and space experience are inap- 
plicable, and where a certain vagueness of out- 
line marks objects and events, probably because 
we have as yet no thought symbols for them ex- 
cept those derived from the still misty realm of 
our own consciousness. In mind functioning as 
faith, there occur, along with emotion, impulse, 
and desire, also cognitive elements, such as recog- 
nized traces of the divine movement in physical 
nature or history or personal experiences, traces 
as real as the footprints of long-vanished reptiles 
in the Connecticut Valley sandstone; and in the 
one case as in the other, with these materials of 
observation, the imagination sets about its proper 
work of reconstruction. Besides, there are the 
observations and reconstructions which countless 
generations back of us have made and which are 
now deeply organized in our constitution and rise 
up, we hardly know whence, to face us as imperi- 
ous religious instincts. On the other hand, there 
is an intuitive or instinctive element in reason. 
While, as Pascal says, we infer the truth of 
propositions, we feel the truth of first principles. 
And who would deny the instinct of causality, of 
the existence of the external world, of the uni- 
formity of natural law, which are presuppositions 
of the rational process everywhere? 



136 THE NEW PEACE 

It appears, therefore, that the opposition be- 
tween religious intuition, or faith, and reflective 
analysis, or reason, is, as Edward Caird says, not 
a real opposition; each complements the other in 
the development of the religious life. This con- 
clusion will, perhaps, prepare us to enter more 
hopefully upon the consideration of the positive 
religious affinities and implications of science. 

The Spirit of Science 

I ask you to think first of the mental attitude of 
the masters of science, the spirit in which they have 
undertaken and prosecuted their work. 

The publication in 1637 °f Descartes 1 " Dis- 
course on Method " is sometimes fixed upon as the 
beginning of the modern scientific development. 
In that famous treatise one of the central prin- 
ciples is the consecration of doubt as a duty; and 
the tradition of doubt, or skepticism, has clung 
tenaciously to the scientific calling down to our 
own day. But it is grossly misinterpreted. The 
apotheosis of doubt is supposed to be the chief fea- 
ture of the cult of science, which offers sacrifice 
on no other altar. The case is far otherwise. 
The high-priest who, perhaps more than any other, 
is responsible for this apotheosis, declares that he 
always had an intense desire to learn how to dis- 
tinguish truth from falsehood, in order to be clear 



SPIRIT 137 

about his actions and to walk sure-footedly in 
this life. There is, he said, a path which leads 
to truth so surely that even the lowest capacity can 
find it ; and this is his guiding rule by which a man 
may find and keep that path: " Give unqualified 
assent to no propositions but those the truth of 
which is so clear that they cannot be doubted." 3 
Moreover, among the laws which he established 
for his own self-government occurs this fourth 
one : " Make the search for truth the business of 
life." 

It is not doubt but truth to which Descartes pays 
homage, and the same high allegiance has bound 
all the priestly line downwards. Copernicus 
doubts the Ptolemaic astronomy until he can 
verify or displace it. Vesalius cannot bow at once 
before the authority of Galen and the authority 
of Nature. Lamarck, poor, old, blind, doubts 
the world which contemns him, that he may hold 
fast the new truth of transformationism, which is 
his sufficient consolation. Johannes Muller is led 
by doubt of the current teaching to a fresh exami- 
nation of the foundations of physiology and mor- 
phology, and he gathers so large a harvest of truth 
that these sciences in his hands enter upon a new 
phase of development. Lyell doubts, and builds 

3 Quoted by Huxley, Essays, " Descartes' Discourse on 
Method." 



138 THE NEW PEACE 

the new geology. And so it has been with all 
those who have given a new pace or a new direc- 
tion to our growing knowledge of nature. Doubt 
is the pathway, but truth is the goal. 

Indeed, the leading characteristic of the scien- 
tific spirit is its whole-hearted consecration to 
truth, its openness of mind before every problem, 
its eagerness to press the solution to the last possi- 
ble point of completeness, and the abiding peace 
with which it accepts the truth with all the conse- 
quences. And you observe that this distinctive 
attitude of the scientific mind clearly involves a 
moral quality and a capacity which is not unlike 
faith. I mean the capacity to see and bring near 
a lofty ideal and a nobleness of purpose in pur- 
suit of it. 

We are told that when Pasteur died a writer in 
one of the Paris newspapers " described the in- 
timate routine of the life at the Pasteur Institute, 
and compared it with that of a mediaeval religious 
community. A little body of men, forsaking the 
world and the things of the world, had gathered 
under the compulsion of a great idea. They had 
given up the rivalries and personal interests of 
ordinary men, and, sharing their goods and their 
work, they lived in austere devotion to science, 
finding no sacrifice of health or money, or of what 
men call pleasure, too great for the common ob- 



SPIRIT 139 

ject. Rumors of war and peace, echoes of the 
turmoil of politics and religion, passed unheeded 
over their monastic seclusion; but if there came 
news of a strange disease in China or Peru, a 
scientific emissary was ready with his microscope 
and his tubes to serve as a missionary of the new 
knowledge and the new hope that Pasteur had 
brought to suffering humanity. The adventurous 
exploits and the patient vigils of this new Order 
have brought about a revolution in our knowledge 
of disease." 4 

The brilliant research of the late surgeon 
Walter Reid upon the etiology of yellow fever 
also illustrates the method and the spirit of science. 
He goes into the smitten region determined to 
find the cause of the dreadful malady. When 
wholly negative results follow the bacteriological 
investigation, men volunteer to sleep in rooms 
where the garments and bedding of patients 
dead of the disease are hung and shaken. No 
one of the volunteers succeeds in contracting 
it in this way, and then they try sleeping in the 
garments and beds of yellow fever patients. This 
also failing, Reid bethinks him of mosquitoes, 
which had been shown able to transmit malaria. 
The men cheerfully submit themselves to the 
tremendous risk for the sake of others, allow 

4 Metchnikoff, "The Nature of Man," in. 



i 4 o THE NEW PEACE 

mosquitoes which had fed on the blood of patients 
to bite them, contract the disease, and demonstrate 
the agent of its spread. 

These illustrations have already suggested that 
the scientific devotion to truth is animated not 
simply by the joy of the quest, but also by the 
hope of some sort of ministry to human need. 
Physiology, the mother of sciences, developed 
early because the stimulus of such a ministry was 
always present and urgent. But even in the case 
where no issue of practical service is foreseen, the 
investigator is sustained by the conviction that 
truth is the most precious of all possessions for the 
shackles it will break and the light it will throw 
on the dark path of life. What is it that the aged 
Professor Huxley says? " If I am to be remem- 
bered at all, I should like to be remembered as 
one who did his best to help the people." On 
his admission to a seat in the French Academy, 
Berthelot, who revolutionized organic chemistry, 
said: " A savant worthy of the name consecrates 
a disinterested life to the grand work of our epoch : 
I mean the amelioration of the lot of all from the 
rich and happy to the humble, the poor, and the 
suffering. . . I have tried to make this the ob- 
ject and end, the directing purpose of my exist- 
ence." Look on this picture of Louis Pasteur. 
He is leaning over the head of an enormous bull- 



SPIRIT 141 

dog whose eyes are blood-shot and whose body is 
convulsed with spasms. He is sucking up into a 
tube some drops of saliva at the distance of a 
finger's length from the foaming head. No saint's 
self-effacement under a lofty impulse surpasses that 
which this laboratory scene exhibits. No Brother 
Bernard's ardor of aspiration which kept his face 
upturned towards heaven for the space of fifteen 
years can be either intenser or nobler than this 
scientist's zeal and consecration to truth and hu- 
manity. While he was engrossed with the study of 
Splenic Fever and the experiments multiplied, Pas- 
teur came to have what his daughter called the face 
of an approaching discovery. If any one timidly 
asked him what stage the investigation had 
reached, he would reply, " I can tell you nothing. 
I dare not express aloud what I hope." At last 
one day he came up from his laboratory with the 
face of triumph. Tears of joy were in his eyes. 
As he embraced the members of the family, he 
said, " I should never console myself, if such a 
discovery as my assistants and I have just made 
were not a French discovery." 

The Faith of Science 

The scheme of physical nature is conceived 
to be something like this : — Gross matter con- 
sists of groups of atoms. Atoms consist of 



142 THE NEW PEACE 

groups of electrical monads. Electrical monads, 
or ions, are only knots in the ether. Electricity 
itself, the reality of which matter is the sensible 
expression, is a modification of the ether, the stuff 
out of which the universe is wholly made. Now, 
the intellectual satisfaction which such a simple 
and consistent view of things imparts is intense, 
almost aesthetic, as Mr. Balfour has remarked. 
Why is it so? Why should we be more pleased 
to think of the sum of things as one substance tak- 
ing varied manifestations, than to think of it as 
composed of the seventy-odd elementary sub- 
stances which are inherently different from one 
another? There is no answer but that we have 
our scientific prejudices, one of which is the preju- 
dice in favor of simplicity of conception. Strange 
to say, this prejudice remains unshaken in the pres- 
ence of evidence going to show the opposite char- 
acter of the universe. We insist that the universe 
is simple and regular, in spite of apparent complex- 
ity and confusion. We are not content to ob- 
serve and set down faithfully what nature actually 
presents to our senses; but we must needs work 
it over and bring it, with some violence it may 
be, into harmony with this deep-seated, ineradi- 
cable sentiment. 

What we have here is obviously a sort of in- 
stinct about the nature of reality. However ob- 



FAITH 143 

scure may be its origin, its intimations are definite 
and clear. It anticipates and interprets sense ex- 
perience. It holds the torch for science to work 
by. In the language of philosophy it would be 
called the necessary postulate of science. I prefer 
to call it the faith of science. Science cannot ex- 
plain its faith in the unity and regularity of nature, 
neither can it get on without it. 

It will be useful to set the faith of science side 
by side with the faith of religion. This has been 
done, with a clearness and force which I cannot 
undertake to improve, by the late Professor Joseph 
Le Conte : " The necessary postulate of science, 
without which scientific activity would be impossi- 
ble, is the rational order of the universe; and 
similarly the necessary postulate of religion, with- 
out which religious activity would be impossible, 
is the moral order of the universe. As science 
postulates the final triumph of reason, so religion 
must postulate the final triumph of righteousness. 
Science believes in the rational order, or in law, in 
spite of apparent confusion. ... So also religion 
is right in her unmistakable belief in the moral 
order, in spite of apparent disorder and evil. . . . 
We may, if we like — as many do — reject the 
faith in the Infinite Goodness, and thereby paralyze 
our religious activity; but, then, to be consistent, 
we must also reject the faith in the Infinite Reason, 



i 4 4 THE NEW PEACE 

and thereby paralyze our scientific activity." 5 

I may add that the faith of science is not with- 
out justification. Schiller says somewhere that 
Nature stands in an eternal alliance with Genius, 
and always honors its demands. For example, 
it is, according to Helmholtz, in the highest de- 
gree remarkable to see how large a number of 
comprehensive theorems, the proof of which taxes 
the highest powers of mathematical analysis, were 
found by Faraday without the use of a single 
mathematical formula, by a kind of intuition with 
instinctive certainty. And so, to the universal 
intuition of rationality and order, Nature responds 
with widening revelations of the supremacy of 
law. The progress of discovery is the practical 
justification of the scientific faith under which the 
progress was made. And we have noticed on a 
former occasion that when religious faith makes 
its venture upon the assumption of righteousness 
at the heart of things, it is not disappointed. The 
universe cashes its cheques in the currency of in- 
ward peace and a heightened efficiency for achieve- 
ment in the outer life. The stars in their courses 
fight on its side for the supremacy of righteous- 
ness. 

5 Essay in Royce's " The Conception of God." 



IMPLICATIONS 145 

The Bearing of Science 

In " Modern Painters " occurs a chapter " Of 
the Novelty of Landscape." A man acquainted 
with Greek, Roman, and Mediaeval art is sup- 
posed to enter a room in which he sees for the 
first time a display of modern paintings. His first 
impression would be that there is something 
strange about the mind of these modern people. 
Mountains, lakes, trees, and bits of stone, clouds 
and runlets of water, — nobody ever seemed to be 
interested in these things before. The human in- 
terest, which wholly occupied the earlier painters, 
seems to have disappeared altogether. Not a 
picture of the gods or heroes, of saints or angels 
or demons, of councils or battles; but mountain 
peaks and ravines, forests and stretches of blue 
sky, stone walls, withered sticks, and flying frogs ! 
Whether this extraordinary change of art sub- 
jects is one to excite pride or not, it is, as 
Ruskin says, assuredly one to excite our deepest 
interest. It is one of the expressions of the new 
sympathy with the phases of external nature which 
is one of the picturesque features of our period. 
This feeling occurs, indeed, in individual cases 
from early times in literary history, as in Horace 
and Lucretius and Theocritus, and in some of the 
early English poets; but to-day it is well-nigh uni- 



146 THE NEW PEACE 

versal, as is shown by the volume and popularity 
of out-door literature with its invitation — 

Come forth into the light of things, 
Let Nature be your teacher. 

This later phase of it may be traced back to the 
eighteenth century. There were in the realm of 
letters Rousseau and Cowper and Wordsworth, 
who were industrious propagators of the senti- 
ment. There was the genial naturalism of Sel- 
borne, who taught Englishmen the inherent in- 
terest of common natural phenomena. Another 
representative of science was the Swiss geologist 
DeSaussure, who more than any other dissipated 
the ideas of horror and danger associated with 
mountains, and taught the world the infinite charm 
and variety of mountain scenery. In the latter 
half of the nineteenth century this sympathetic 
response to all nature's varying moods grew 
rapidly under the stimulus of the general scien- 
tific movement of the time and the influence of 
men like E. Krause in Germany, Richard Jef- 
feries and Ruskin in England, and, on this side, 
" Old Silver-Top," as John Burroughs has been 
affectionately called, and his younger followers, 
as Roberts, W. J. Long, and Thompson-Seton. 

Nature, which was once devoid of interest when 
she was not repulsive, is now invested with at- 



IMPLICATIONS 147 

tractions which are on every poet's tongue. We 
have acquired an eye for all her beauty, an ear 
for all her music, a heart open to all the sug- 
gestions of her solemn grandeur, her deep repose, 
her infinite order. She refreshes us in the inward 
part, she rebukes our strife and pettiness, she 
elicits and confirms our aspirations. We no 
longer have to make our way through an enemy's 
country at the risk of losing our religion at every 
step. The later and deeper scientific interpreta- 
tion of Nature makes her our ally and friend. 
One is not surprised, therefore, to hear Profes- 
sor Shaler saying that it was a more profound 
grasp of science itself that brought him back from 
an early excursion into religious negations. 6 For 
science has now laid bare the solid foundations 
on which religion reposes. Let us take note of 
some particulars. 

1. The Unity of Nature. I have a mathe- 
matical friend who says that mathematics, as well 
as the Bible, makes the proclamation, " Hear, O 
Israel, the Lord thy God is one God." He ex- 
plains that the number of curves of the fourth 
power of the unknown quantity is countless, and 
those of the fifth power are even more numerous; 
and yet he shows me an expression containing a 
very few letters that will apply to the length of 

6 " The Interpretation of Nature," iv. 



148 THE NEW PEACE 

every possible curve, another that will apply to 
the surface described by the revolution of every 
possible curve, and another to the solid described 
by the revolution of every possible curve. In 
short, for this infinite diversity, one comprehend- 
ing principle. 

We are able to-day to recognize relations where 
formerly only discrete facts were perceived. We 
discover interdependence and harmony where to 
the older conception there appeared only isolation, 
if not discord. For us the doctrine of the ether 
and the law of gravitation bind the myriad worlds 
of space into a consistent universe. The law of 
evolution unifies the totality of nature as it exists 
to-day by supplying the one method of its origin, 
as the protoplasm theory imparts structural unity 
to the varied forms of organic nature. The law 
of the correlation of energy obliterates the ter- 
ritorial boundaries which formerly divided off the 
phenomena of nature into distinct and unrelated 
regions. It might have been foreseen that, after 
the unity of external nature was discovered, the 
moral and spiritual sphere could not long with- 
hold the secret of its inner consistency and rela- 
tionships. Here also boundaries have taken 
themselves up and off, and the separate and war- 
ring provinces of the spirit have fused into one 
realm under one law. So that the natural and the 



UNITY 149 

supernatural no longer threaten and confound one 
another across an impassable chasm. There is 
no chasm. The supernatural is natural, and the 
natural is supernatural. Even that inveterate 
antithesis of matter and spirit shows signs of dis- 
solving. In some of the seers of the race, as 
Plato and Dante, matter and spirit compound for 
their differences and almost melt into one another; 
in the impassioned glow of their conceptions, as 
Walter Pater points out, the spiritual attains visi- 
bility and the material drops its earthiness. But 
with a new stress and inflection we are now asking 
whether matter is not simply the signal of the 
spirit's activity, the theatre where the spirit dis- 
ports itself, the word in which the spirit seeks 
expression, the garment of beauty in which the 
spirit arrays itself. 

Moreover, the divine and the human nature 
draw into a close fellowship, the human nature 
being divine in its origin and aspiration, and the 
divine nature finding that it can express itself in the 
human. The divine nature no longer sits apart in 
remote cold clouds concerning itself with man only 
to impose an arbitrary legislation from which it is 
itself exempt. On the contrary, with the new light 
on that ancient word " Let us make man in our 
image," we now see that community of nature 
necessitates one law. There is not one righteous- 



1 5 o THE NEW PEACE 

ness below and another above the clouds. The 
coinage of the moral realm must pass current in 
heaven and on earth alike. 

Lotze remarks that, " to us who admire the 
isolated remains, the thought expressed in many 
an ancient work of art seems to be too slight in 
comparison with the labor expended in presenting 
it in sculpture ; but such works were then intended 
to serve as fitting adornments in edifices the most 
insignificant details of which were pervaded by a 
coherent idea of harmonious beauty of form." 
So, isolated and apparently insignificant details of 
nature acquire meaning and become worthy and 
noble in the light of their relation to the majestic 
structure of which they are constituent parts. But 
this consideration is not all. The unified system 
of things revealed by science is the necessary 
corollary of the religious faith in the infinite per- 
sonal Intelligence. If God exists, this is precisely 
such a world as He would make. There can 
hardly be any doubt that the growing conception 
of the unity of nature which has marked the last 
three or four decades had much to do with the 
unmistakable movement towards faith during the 
same period. 

2. The New Teleology. But one may say 
that nature may be a self-consistent unit, and yet 
be nothing more than a machine, and therefore 



DESIGN 151 

morally indifferent; or, if it have moral signifi- 
cance, what assurance have we that it is good and 
not bad? Indeed, one meets such views now and 
again in contemporary literature. For example, 
in his well-known lecture on " Art and Morality," 
Ferdinand Brunetiere declares that nature's in- 
difference to us is equalled only by her lack of 
regard for all that we call by the name of good 
or bad. He goes still further and says, " Na- 
ture is immoral, thoroughly immoral; . . . there 
is no vice of which she does not give us an ex- 
ample, nor any virtue from which she does not 
dissuade us " ; and in her failures, exceptions, and 
monstrosities he thinks he finds evidence that she 
is no more true than she is good. 

There can be no surprise that laymen in science 
take such a view when it is remembered that sci- 
entists themselves have given the cue. So acute 
and influential a man as Professor Huxley was 
not a little perplexed by what he considered the 
conflict between the cosmic process and the ethical 
process which is observed in human history. In 
his famous Romanes Lecture on " Evolution and 
Ethics" in 1893, he said: "The practice which 
is ethically best — what we call goodness or virtue 
— involves a course of conduct which, in all re- 
spects, is opposed to what leads to success in the 
cosmic struggle for existence. In the place of 



152 THE NEW PEACE 

ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint. 
... It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of ex- 
istence." He thinks, furthermore, that, since both 
have been evolved, there is as much natural sanc- 
tion for the immoral sentiments as for the moral. 
Accordingly, it seems, on the face of things, that 
the ancient philosophy of pessimism gains in the 
evolution theory a new and broader basis; the doc- 
trine that Satan is the Prince of this world gets 
a scientific foundation. The struggle for exist- 
ence is as cruel as it is inevitable. The tyranny 
of strength and cunning is unmitigated. Teeth 
and claws go at their bloody business without 
mercy. And all life together is helpless under the 
mighty hand of fate, which seems supreme in the 
physical world. Vain is the cry of the innumer- 
able tender things which are crushed in the grind 
of the great machine. 

But we need to take a second and deeper look 
at the ethical bearing of the evolution theory, to 
see whether this dark and bloody inference is 
justified. The trouble with the inference lies in 
the limited range of the induction, in the lack of 
perspective. Its observation is too exclusively 
microscopic. One day when this matter was in 
discussion Tennyson told the story of a tender- 
hearted Brahmin who, on observing with the mi- 
croscope how the creatures in the world of a 



DESIGN 153 

water-drop were devouring one another, was 
moved with a boundless indignation at an instru- 
ment which made such a revelation of heartless 
cruelty, and smashed it into fragments. What 
we require is, not to make this sort of obser- 
vation impossible, but to supplement the micro- 
scope with the telescope, to lift our eyes from de- 
tails to tendencies, from the individual to the 
species. I think we shall see that " the gladiator- 
ial theory of existence " is unwarranted. 

Let me remind you that the terms in which it 
is expressed — self-assertion, struggle, the hunt- 
ing down of competitors — are figures of speech 
in scientific literature, and when they are inter- 
preted in strict literalness are wholly inapplicable. 
We are not justified in reading human standards 
and sentiments into the behavior of the lower 
animals. The butcher-bird which rends a tit- 
mouse limb from limb is no more cruel than the 
human butcher who quarters beef for the market; 
nay, than that same Texas steer was when his 
lithe tongue lapped in the helpless tender herbage 
of the prairie. If a man should rend a titmouse 
limb from limb, the action would be properly 
called cruel; but the butcher-bird is not a man, 
and its action is neither good nor bad, for it is 
not performed in the realm of moral ideas. It 
is true the bird is not merciful; neither is it moved 



154 THE NEW PEACE 

by malice. Besides, it is not improbable that the 
exposure of the titmouse tribe to such a peril 
reacts favorably upon the tribal constitution, im- 
proving in the long run its powers of flight and 
its wits. If so, whatever view the impaled in- 
dividual titmouse may take, the butcher-bird is 
the friend of the species, a blessing in disguise. 
And it is to be remembered, further, that the birds 
of prey are not to be compared in the number 
either of species or of individuals with the vege- 
table feeders. There is, in fact, no adequate 
ground for the popular view which, under the 
theory of the struggle for existence, construes the 
world as an arena where all organisms, man in- 
cluded, fight one another to the death. When 
species are exterminated at all, it is not in a whole- 
sale slaughter, but by the gradual and usually 
painless operation of forces extending over a suc- 
cession of generations, such as the failure of cor- 
respondence with the total environment, which 
may or may not include animals of prey. A most 
effective factor and one which involves no suf- 
fering is the progressive diminution of the degree 
of fertility necessary to the maintenance of the 
species. Another is the weakness or rigidity of 
organization which retards unduly its adaptation 
to a changing environment. 

With this explanation of terms, we may ad- 



DESIGN 155 

vance to consider the general trend of things under 
the evolution process. Now, it is involved in the 
nature of the process that " the first in conception 
is the last in execution"; a tendency is to be 
judged by its issue. The last term of an evolu- 
tionary series may prophesy what is yet to follow, 
but it can hardly be doubted that it also interprets 
what has gone before. The nature of man is 
the crown of the process of evolution. We need 
not inquire now whether a still higher creature 
is possible to it. We only need to recognize man 
as the latest and highest term in a long series 
which stretches back to the dawn of organic life 
on earth. His physical frame is the most complex 
in structure and the most efficient in action in the 
whole series. His mental life is the widest, the 
fullest, and the most varied. His moral nature 
is so much advanced beyond what appears in any 
of the creatures below him that some deny its 
hereditary connection with any possible germs of 
morality anywhere else in the series. This highly 
endowed creature whose most distinctive feature 
is his capacity to discern the good and the bad, 
standing thus as the climax of the natural achieve- 
ment, throws backward over all the lower grades 
of organization a light in which the meaning and 
purpose of all grow plain. In this light Nature 
is seen to be on the move. Things are marching 



156 THE NEW PEACE 

out of a dim past into a widening future. The 
struggle for existence is transformed into " a race 
for perfection." The cosmic process is itself 
driving forward to an ethical issue, and that once 
reached the development is continued into relig- 
ion and social regulations. And how can the 
cosmic process be in conflict with the ethical pro- 
cess which, even according to Professor Huxley, 
was produced by it? Will the mother repudiate 
her offspring? 

In this general purposive progress from the 
inorganic to the organic, from sensation to mind, 
from mind to morals and religion, — from the 
clod to conscience, — we have ample compensation 
for the surrender, upon the demand of science, 
of Paley's minute design, the teleology of details. 
Shall I appeal to the authority of Darwin? He 
cannot, indeed, allow that the variations of or- 
ganic beings are designed, but he says, " If we 
consider the whole universe, the mind refuses to 
look at it as the outcome of chance, i.e., without 
design or purpose." 7 And here is Huxley saying 
that " it is only the common and coarser forms 
of teleology that fail when tested by natural selec- 
tion. There is a wider teleology which is not 
touched by the doctrine of evolution, but is actu- 
ally based upon the fundamental proposition of 

7 " More Letters," I, 395. 



NEW FRONT 157 

evolution." 

The end and explanation, the climax and de- 
nouement of the divine drama in creation, is the 
emergence from the bosom of universal nature 
of a spirit which can stand erect and speak face 
to face with God. And God is repaid for aeons 
of waiting and travail, for it breaks His infinite 
solitude, His uncompanioned journeyings through 
wildernesses of insensate things, and presents Him 
with a person, in some way his counterpart, in 
possibility His friend. The rise through succes- 
sive grades of being up to this fulfilment of the 
creative impulse is symbolized in epitome in 
Seraphita's farewell on the eve of her translation 
when she looks out over the mountain-girt fiord 
from the cliff of the Sieg: " Farewell, rock of 
granite, thou shalt be a flower : farewell flower, 
thou shalt be a dove : farewell dove, thou shalt be 
a woman; farewell woman, thou shalt be Suffering; 
farewell man, thou shalt be Belief; farewell, you, 
who shall be all love and prayer! " 

3. The Idealistic Interpretation of Nature. — 
The illuminating and supporting influence of 
science upon religion is not restricted to the two 
generalizations which we have now considered. 
There is another of perhaps even richer signifi- 
cance to which, as I conclude these lectures, I must 
call your attention. 



158 THE NEW PEACE 

Within the last thirty or forty years there has 
been in progress a marked change of feeling on 
the part of leading men of science respecting the 
ultimate reality, the deeper meaning of the uni- 
verse; so that to-day scientific opinion presents a 
radically different front on this paramount ques- 
tion. About the middle decades of the last cen- 
tury it seems to have been flushed with its recent 
conquests and to have been in high conceit with 
its well-nigh omnipotent method. It was already 
well advanced in its mission of plucking the heart 
of mystery out of universal nature, and but a few 
years more of the unflinching application of the 
laws of physics and chemistry would suffice to fin- 
ish the business and set man free from the thral- 
dom of the last superstition. It was dogmatic 
and arrogant. Latterly, however, scientists have 
recognized with increasing clearness that they 
have been occupied with surface problems whose 
solution has merely led them in to the central 
mysteries, and before these they stand in a help- 
less impotence which has completely changed their 
tone and attitude. The physical tests on which 
they have hitherto relied cannot be applied here, 
and the impression is produced that the essence 
of things, which refuses to respond to these tests, 
is after all not physical. Haeckel himself cites 
a number of cases of such changes of view, such 



NEW FRONT 159 

psychological metamorphoses, as he calls them, — 
Virchow, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Wundt, Von 
Baer. He seeks to explain them as due to the 
increase of prejudice and the loss of energy at- 
tendant upon the decay of the brain as old age 
comes on. He must have forgotten this " ex- 
planation " when he came to write his preface, 
in which he says: " For fully half a century has 
my mind's work proceeded, and I now, in my sixty- 
sixth year, may claim that it is mature " ! 8 
In reality these changes spring out of the fuller 
recognition of the limitations of the scientific 
method, the ease with which the assurance of a 
predetermined negation may be broken down. 
With Browning's acute old Bishop, these scientists 
say: 

How can we guard our unbelief, 
Make it bear fruit to us? — the problem here. 
Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, 
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 
A chorus-ending from Euripides, — 
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears, 
As old and new at once as Nature's self, 
To rap and knock and enter in our soul, 
Take hands and dance there a fantastic ring, 
Round the ancient idol, on its base again — 
The grand Perhaps. We look on helplessly; 
There the old misgivings, crooked questions, are. 

Science is much more modest than formerly in 

s "The Riddle of the Universe," Preface, vii. 



160 THE NEW PEACE 

the presence of the universal religious instinct. 

Not only so. There are positive declarations 
on every hand that the conception of the physical 
world as a mechanism constructed on a rigid 
mathematical plan " has no more objective reality 
than the circles of latitude and longitude on the 
sun." Hear this word of Professor Karl Pear- 
son: "Step by step men of science are coming 
to recognize that mechanism is not at the bottom 
of phenomena." And this from the President of 
the British Association last year: "As natural 
science grows it leans more, not less, upon an 
idealistic interpretation of the universe." Indeed, 
all men, excepting of course always the eminent 
zoologist of Jena, all men are feeling now that 
a system of things out of which by natural proc- 
esses mind arose must itself be mental. And 
there seems to be no longer any reason to ques- 
tion Sir Oiver Lodge's recent statement, — " the 
region of religion and the region of the completer 
science are one." 

I think of Science as passing to and fro in God's 
garden, busy with its forms of beauty, its fruits 
and flowers, its creeping thing, its beast and bird, 
the crystal shut in its stones, the gold grains of its 
sands, and coming now at length in the cool of the 
long day upon God Himself walking in His garden. 



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